Wat Wordt Gedeeld

Wat Wordt Gedeeld (What is Shared) is a public art project in the village of Nieuw Calslagen, consisting of a park designed by Maze de Boer in collaboration with the Municipality of Aalsmeer, with four artworks integrated into it. The park is located on and around the site of the former Calslagen Church, one of the oldest sites in the municipality. Here, nature, imagination and history come together.

The four works are inspired by the changes Calslagen has undergone over the centuries. They reflect what a place and its inhabitants share: stories passed down through generations, a history that leaves traces in the landscape, and a park as a shared space for meeting and remembrance.

MUS (Sparrow) is a bronze sparrow on a plinth, placed within the old foundations of the church. The work refers to the fire that swept through Calslagen in 1803. The fire started when the pastor fired his gun from the garden room of the parsonage to scare away birds. The sparks set the thatched roof of the parsonage alight, after which the fire spread to the school building and several workers’ houses. In local folklore, the pastor became a minister and the gun became an air rifle, but the sparrow remained. The work stands on the spot where this story began.

SLUIS (Lock) evokes the former Breggevaart waterway through a playful formation of mooring posts. Once used for mooring boats, the posts now function as an element of play. Visitors can jump from post to post, experiencing the water-bound history of the site: a landscape that in the 18th and 19th centuries was largely transformed into extensive peat lakes.

WEG (Road) consists of a streetlamp that branches into an Amsterdam and a Leiden variant, with an enamelled sign between them referring to the village of Calslagen. The work evokes the historic road connecting the two cities, a route that once ran through what is now a quiet landscape and connected Calslagen with the outside world for centuries.

VEEN (Peat) is a fence made from peat-cutting tools and peat spades, with a patch of land in between recalling the peat that was once cut, dried and used as fuel here. Peat extraction was directly responsible for the creation of the Westeinderplassen lakes and, with it, the disappearance of large parts of the land on which Calslagen once stood.

The works were made using a combination of traditional craftsmanship and contemporary techniques: from bronze cast using the lost-wax method and 3D-printed bronze to water-cut corten steel, carved natural stone and hand-worked hardwood.

From beginning to end, local residents were closely involved with the artwork. They have now given the entire project, the park and the four artworks, the new name ‘Ons Parkje’, meaning ‘Our Little Park’.