‘Zenmast,’ an artwork by Jeroen Doorenweerd, was opened on Friday November 3th of 2023 in Houthaven, in the river IJ along the quay at Revaleiland. The artwork is a 30-meter mast without a ship, on a round wooden raft floating in the water. The mast crosses the horizon, pierces the sky and mirrors itself in the water. It is a summary of what used to be; the logs in the water of the old lumber port and the masts in the sky. With this floating artwork, Doorenweerd wants to bring something of this history back into the present river view.
Jeroen Doorenweerd is a Dutch visual artist who primarily creates landscape, sculptural interventions in public space. Since 1990, he has realized artworks in such diverse locations as a container transshipment, a ministry, a prison, a meadow and a shelter for drug addicts.
As the artist himself writes, “In the beautiful historic photographs of the lumber port, endless amounts of logs lie in the water like a huge wooden floor. Men stand on the logs with long poles. There are sailing ships at the roadstead and at the wharf. At the beginning of the last century, the big masts disappeared. There were only the horizontal logs in the water and small masts and chimneys of the steamboats. With that, the typical vertical intersections of the horizon also disappeared. Now the floating trunks are also long gone history.”
Image: Helma Timmermans
