The Netherlands in Pieces

Martin van der Graaff

In 2015, the left-wing Utrecht bookstore De Rooie Rat closed its doors. Maarten van der Graaff bought old pamphlets, studies and magazines at the last minute, out of interest in the political language of the seventies, eighties and nineties. Van der Graaff went in search of the stories we tell to answer a complicated question: what is the Netherlands?

Fragments of songs, historical texts, interviews, poems and policy documents come together in this collection to reveal the many possible answers to that question in a layered document. At the same time he encountered the fragmented history of his own sexuality, which crept into the poems. This resulted in a collection full of interrupted stories, in which the seams between the pieces remain visible.