On the night of 1–2 November 2023, Amsterdam was asleep. Storm Ciarán was sweeping across the city, but that was nothing out of the ordinary. What no one knew was that something had gone wrong with the sluice gates at Ijmuiden at 3.52 am. For two hours, North Sea water flowed uncontrolled towards the city. It was not until 5.45 am that an alert Rijkswaterstaat employee discovered what was happening. Ten more centimetres and the sewers would have overflowed, cellars flooded, and Amsterdam would have spent weeks dealing with the aftermath.

It remained a near miss. And yet, the Netherlands quickly forgot — it hadn’t happened, after all. When photographer Bebe Blanco Agterberg read the news, she could not let it go. What does it mean to live in a city that came within ten centimetres of disaster? What does it mean to live in a country where a substantial part of the land lies below sea level, while the water keeps rising?

MK: Last year at Unseen I first encountered your project The New Waterworks (2025), which grew out of that night of 1–2 November 2023. I remember feeling a kind of vicarious shame when I saw it, because your work made me realise how barely aware I had been of the danger we had faced — and still face. Did that narrowly averted catastrophe make it immediately clear to you that you needed to make work about it?

BBA: Actually, the subject had been occupying me since 2019. There was a major storm then as well, and in 2020 the city again narrowly escaped a flood. Far more is happening than we as a society realise. In 2023, the danger came from a fault in the sluice at IJmuiden, which normally channels fresh canal water out into the North Sea at ebb tide, preventing the river from bursting its banks.

What struck me: there was one day of commotion, and then it vanished from the news. On the morning of November 2^nd, I cycled from Amsterdam-Noord — where I live — to work, and part of the quay had subsided. Nobody was talking about it. So, I started asking people how that could be. Many said: it’ll be fine, we’ve always won against the water. The struggle against the water is deeply embedded in Dutch culture, partly due to widespread images of previous floodings, like the Flood Disaster of 1953. Culminating in the Delta Works flood protection system, the way in which the country conquered this struggle has become a source of national pride. But are we truly in control, when sea levels are rising faster than what the Delta Works were ever designed for? Are we waiting for another flood disaster before we open our eyes to what climate change means for this country? That is how The New Waterworks began. I wanted to explore how we might look at water differently.

MK: The final result is not documentary, it is more art-historical in character. Can you describe what you made?

BBA: I simply started researching documentarily: for instance, by photographing experimental dykes designed by Radboud University. For example, I got to speak with Tjeerd Bouma, researcher at NIOZ, the centre of expertise in the Netherlands for the ocean, sea and coast. He said: ‘we are essentially lobbying, because we cannot get funding to actually implement measures to protect the country against rising sea levels. Culture is the obstacle. That mentality of ‘we’ve always beaten water’. So I came to realise that the project was not just about infrastructure, but far more about culture.

A historian at Radboud University, Adriaan Duiveman, told me that in the Netherlands there are essentially three dominant water narratives: collaborating with water (amphibious), conquering water (territorial), or ultimately losing to water (apocalyptic). I went to the Rijksmuseum to look at how water appears in the Dutch visual tradition — heroic naval battle paintings, the water wolf fighting the Holland lion. I kept encountering that same symbolism on decorative tile tableaux, the kind people hang at home, which shows how those narratives are literally baked into daily life.

The New Waterworks consists of five tile tableaux forming a historical timeline: going from the 1953 Flood Disaster to the Delta Works, up to a photograph I made of the salt marshes and mudflats near Yerseke, where NIOZ has created natural landscapes that absorb wave energy and allow the land to grow with the rising sea level – one of the latest inventions within the country’s balancing act. Winning and losing, past and present: a sequence of the Dutch battle against the water.

MK: With The New Waterworks you have visualised a historical timeline of sorts, of the Dutch battle against the water, up to how our country should face the future – hopefully without waiting until history repeats. Yet the theme has not let you go, and a new project will be premiering at Unseen?

BBA: I felt that with The New Waterworks I had tapped into a new narrative form, but it did not yet feel entirely like my own voice. Fiction is really my world. Novelist Elif Shafak once said she writes fiction because it allows you to take people into a different world connected to their own reality, yet full of truths. That is the approach I took in Pretend There Is Water.

I came upon Schokland — an island without water. Until 1932 it was a real island in the small sea originally adjacent to the North Sea, called the Zuiderzee [Southern Sea], which after the completion of the Afsluitdijk [Closing Dike: a 32-kilometer long, iconic causeway and sea barrier in the Netherlands] became a lake, the IJsselmeer. Through an inventive process of land reclamation in the eastern half of the former Zuiderzee, Schokland became part of the youngest land surface in the Netherlands on 1 January 1986, with the inauguration of the new province of Flevoland.

MK: An island without water… is that still visible, since it has literally been reclaimed from the sea?

BBA: The old harbour is still there: harbour posts, a lighthouse, a keeper’s cottage. Its roughly 650 inhabitants that the island once had suffered greatly from floods and poverty until the entire island was evacuated by royal decree in 1859. Now it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, because it still shows something of how people lived in the nineteenth century. I found it intriguing: making a project about water in a place where you can barely see any water.

MK: Certainly intriguing, also because we must ask ourselves again what we may have to evacuate and leave behind in the future. How did you begin working on Schokland?

BBA: During my research I encountered a youth theatre group that performs on Schokland about climate. I began collaborating with them. I first asked them to re-enact old water scenes. That is why you see the water wolf reappear in my photographs, for example.

MK: So fiction until it potentially becomes non-fiction?

BBA: Yes, exactly. It began for me with the question: what has already been made in the Netherlands about water? And how can I contribute something new to that? In doing so I looked closely at the work of the Dutch photographer Cas Oorthuys (1908–1975), because he made an enormous amount of work about water.

The interesting thing about Cas Oorthuys is that he was a great admirer of Henri Cartier-Bresson. For him it was very much about the ‘decisive moment’, about capturing everything that happened in front of his lens. Whereas I am actually the opposite. I sometimes deliberately do not want to look at what is happening, but equally I do want to look at the reality of what could happen. In my work, I therefore plan everything in advance.

MK: In the context of water that is also rather apt, because in the Netherlands we are also enormously keen to stay in control. The idea that everything is manageable and that we can control water, in order to keep our country below sea level.

BBA: Precisely. And what Cas Oorthuys did with his work was observe and register. For me it became about taking control instead: how can you tell a story in a different way?

One of the stories I tell in Pretend There Is Water is the Schokkerdans — the Schokker Dance. Schokland once consisted of two parts. To get from one part of the island to the other, people had to walk across a plank over the water, holding on to each other and turning.

Although I always prepare everything thoroughly in advance and had gathered a great deal of material, I also enjoy being guided by improvisation in the moment. One of the young actors said he knew how the dance should go, because he had performed it many times. I usually set out frameworks in advance, but during the actual photographing I say very little. Then it comes together collectively. Their director subsequently suggested performing the movements very slowly. That brought much more tension to the image. As though it were a contact sheet by Cas Oorthuys, I captured the Schokker Dance movement by movement, image by image.

I found it interesting to bring the form of contact sheets back to the historical tile tableaux. Up close you see a detail unfolding each time; but the dance as a whole forms a single contact sheet. By printing it on tiles, it felt like historical tile wisdom and national memory: set in stone, yet also fragile. The Dutch dance with water — a history that flows into the future.

BEBE BLANCO AGTERBERG is an Amsterdam-based photographer and visual artist. She is fascinated by the question of what is truth and what is fiction. Her work explores how history, imagery, and collective narratives shape our perception of the world, and how fact and fiction are closely intertwined. Agterberg challenges viewers to let go of familiar frameworks and see stories through different eyes, creating space for new insights and progress. Her latest series Pretend There Is Water will be premiering at Unseen, presented by Galerie Le Neuf Sinibaldi.

MIRJAM KOOIMAN is Senior Curator at Foam. She holds a BA in Art History and MA in Curating Arts & Culture from the University of Amsterdam. She has curated over 40 exhibitions and initiated international collaborations in Mexico, Nigeria, and Indonesia to foster a global dialogue on photography. From early darkroom experiments to the latest technological innovations, Kooiman explores photography’s evolving and enigmatic nature — and, through that lens, how to relate to all these different realities.