Lucky day
In 2021, my studio was located in Het Witte Theater, an old building on the North Sea Canal, directly opposite Tata Steel.
An imposing skyline of towers, vast buildings, pipes, ducts and smoke. A lot of smoke.
Sometimes, at the end of the day, a thin layer of black dust covered my car.
When the wind blew from the north, the air often smells of metal or rotten eggs.
After a severe easterly storm that winter, the snow near Wijk aan Zee turned black. The media quickly picked up the images, and the words black snow echoed throughout the region.
For many local residents, it was the final straw.
There had been graphite rain before, and now this.
The tide began to turn against the seemingly invincible steel giant in IJmuiden.
And so Black Snow came to life — as a symbolic blanket covering the IJmond region.
Marianne lived with her husband Tom on Middenhavenstraat in IJmuiden, on a industrial site near the harbour and close to the lighthouse. Their home stood among warehouses, quays and infrastructure, in the immediate vicinity of the steel industry.
Marianne was seriously ill after multiple brain haemorrhages and largely confined to bed. “Laying cards,” she said when I asked what she still liked to do — a way of looking ahead when much had become uncertain. Outside, work in the harbour continued. Her life unfolded in the shadow of industry, intertwined with an environment that never comes to rest.