Blowing into the Fish's Mouth

An exhibition by Jens JT Huls and Samantha Pellarini

For this Into Nature exhibition, artists Samantha Pellarini and Jens JT Huls each developed a new work in response to the Onlanden water storage and nature reserve, a young marshland in the northern part of Drenthe.

Jens JT Huls (he/they) visited the Onlanden with great regularity over the past year, often at times when no people were present. He frequently stayed for hours at a time, focusing on the physical experience of being there: on seeing the sun rise, hearing the birds wake up, and seeing the people arrive. During these encounters with the Onlanden, a correspondence develops with the Onlanden in which he—without forcing the swamp into a recognizable entity—carefully probes who or what it is, and what their own relationship with the swamp is. In doing so, the separation between the swamp and one's own body appears simultaneously thinner than expected and insurmountable. In the exhibition, the letters, other texts, and research material have been brought together on an enormous table, where they form a constellation of language, place, and memory. Furthermore, with an audio work created in collaboration with Tim Daniël Stienstra, Jens combines messages to the swamp with the sound of electromagnetic signals received and transmitted by the Onlanden.

Samantha Pellarini describes the Onlanden as “once a land without a name, once a no-man’s-land, once a sea, once a glacier, once farmland, and once a home.” She views landscapes as changeable, constantly in the making. At this point in time, the landscape of the Onlanden seems entirely controlled by humans, who have endowed it with all kinds of functions, from hydrological to aesthetic. But who or what is this landscape if we let go of the expectations we currently have of it? What identity still lies hidden deep within the soggy soil if we look beyond it? Samantha wondered if her body could help find answers to this and undertook days-long walks in the area. She viewed her body as a porous entity with which she might be able to learn to read the landscape better. She listened to the reeds, felt the mud, lay down, talked with others about the landscape, and performed several performances there to become part of the movements present, of the water, the reeds, the soil, the animals… In the exhibition, she brings together her research in the form of a spatial installation featuring text, imagery, and elements that symbolize the water system of the Onlanden. From the whole emerges the image of the Onlanden as an almost mythical being. During the exhibition, Samantha will perform several times.

Jens JT Huls (2000, NL, lives and works in Groningen, NL) engages with language, multimedia installations, and performance, exploring identity through memories, historiography, and embodied stories. In 2026, he was admitted to the Temporary Master's Programme in Performance at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam.

Samantha Pellarini (1994, VE, lives and works in Groningen, NL) has an interdisciplinary practice in which she explores the intersections between ecology, migration, and transformation. In 2026, she was one of the winners of the Groninger Beeldende Kunst Stipendia.

Into Nature is an art platform in the province of Drenthe that connects contemporary art, social and ecological issues at ever-changing locations in the Drenthe landscape. The exhibition has been made possible by support from the Province of Drenthe, the Mondriaan Fund and the Municipality of Noordenveld.