In a country where space is planned, negotiated, and defined down to the last centimeter, there seems to be little room left for the unexpected. The work Element of Surprise (2015) introduces precisely that: a moment of fictional disruption within the tightly regulated reality of Dutch spatial planning.

The impetus was the expansion and relocation of the harbor at Lobith, a project in which the interests of shipping, ecology, safety, and property intersect in a legal and administrative jungle. I responded to this complexity by developing a scenario in which a footbridge breaks away from the harbor and—at a random moment, in an unexpected place—washes up on land.

What began as hypothetical research unexpectedly gained physical grounding when I discovered a forgotten piece of land whose owner had no idea they owned it. This unintended residual space became the place where the footbridge could be anchored in the landscape: as a sculptural anomaly, a silent collision between fiction and regulation.

Elements of Surprise raised questions about control, chance, and property. The work exposed the fragile boundary between planned and unplanned, between system and space, between infrastructure and imagination.

“Elements of Surprise touches on the absurdity and tightly regulated nature of Dutch spatial planning, but does so with a playful, imaginative twist. The imaginary footbridge that "washes up" on a forgotten plot of land sheds light on everything that slips through the cracks of the system: ownership, control, chance, and space as a political playing field.”