latest project

Walls Don’t Clear Water no2 (2026)

Walls Don’t Clear Water no2 is a new iteration of a body of work that began in 2022, during a residency at Vrouw Muskens in collaboration with GGZ Breburg in Dongen. Rather than reconstructing the original installation, Fountain for Wellbeing; Walls Don’t Clear Water, this work returns to questions around institutional care, wellbeing and the history of psychiatric seclusion through a newly developed life-size ‘echo’ of the isolation cell, alongside sculptural elements, photoworks and a sound work by Hugo Boccara, originally produced for the first presentation. This reimagined topos subsequently became the setting for a new series of photographic works and a short film, published shortly after the exhibition.

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The isolation cell embodies a particular logic of care: one in which safety is produced through surveillance, control and sanction. Its walls, doors and observation window do more than enclose a body. They determine where it can move, how it can be kept from view, and how much physical and social proximity is possible. In doing so, they choreograph how a body can relate to others and to society. The cell is therefore not simply a historical object, but a physical manifestation of the uneasy kinship between care and control within institutionalised care, where bodies considered unwanted or difficult to accommodate can be separated in the name of safety and protection.

The logic of the cell extends beyond the institution into society at large. Bodies are likewise subject to forms of surveillance and regulation that shape how we are expected to move, behave and participate. We learn to abide by social norms and expectations, and to monitor ourselves accordingly; those who cannot, or choose not to, comply may face exclusion, stigma or sanction. The able body – healthy, resilient, productive, independent and seemingly in control – is often treated as the body best equipped to participate in society. Wellbeing can thus become a condition of belonging: an expectation to remain functional, adaptable and capable of keeping vulnerability out of sight. The pressure to perform this kind of wellbeing can become a form of perfectionism, in which appearing able becomes part of how we secure our place among others.

Water offers a way of reconsidering this logic by shifting attention from the body as something bounded, autonomous and self-contained towards a body that is porous, dependent and continually changing. Astrida Neimanis’s hydrofeminist thinking proposes that we are all ‘bodies of water’: bodies that are never entirely separate from one another or from the environments in which we live. Water moves between bodies, landscapes and times. It nourishes, carries, cleans and connects, while also holding traces of what has passed through it. It does not respect the boundaries we draw around individual bodies, nor does it remain fixed within them. Instead, it circulates, seeps, mixes and changes, making visible forms of exchange and dependency that a more isolated understanding of the body obscures.

In Walls Don’t Clear Water no2, water becomes both material and metaphor for thinking through these relations. Its movement offers a counterpoint to the fixed boundaries and controlled conditions of the isolation cell, while its capacity to connect and carry suggests a different understanding of care: one that does not begin with containing, correcting or perfecting the body, but recognises vulnerability, dependency and change as part of being embodied. If wellbeing is no longer understood primarily through autonomy, resilience and the ability to remain in control, what other forms of participation and belonging might become possible? What happens when dependency is understood not as something to overcome, but as a condition of being?

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The work builds on Fountain for Wellbeing; Walls Don’t Clear Water, an exhibition developed in 2022 during Dijkhuizen’s residency at Vrouw Muskens in collaboration with GGZ Breburg, and subsequently presented at Beautiful Distress House in Amsterdam. Bringing together two bodies of work, Fountain for Wellbeing and Walls Don’t Clear Water, the project comprised a series of fountains situated on the grounds of GGZ Breburg and in the exhibition, connected through a video livestream; a life-size reconstruction of the isolation cell in which Dijkhuizen stayed as part of his embodied research; a series of photographic works; sculptural interventions; a film and a maquette; and a sound work by Hugo Boccara. Together, these elements formed a ‘topos between reality and fiction’ in which care, control, safety and security became difficult to separate. Here, water offered a speculative counterpoint to the choreography of solitary confinement: a material that cannot be confined and does not follow the logic of the walls around it.