JUTTEN Format: Paperback

Mudlarking' is the act of searching the riverbed for historical treasures. Mudlarks comb the river’s foreshore, which is only accessible for a few hours a day at low tide, in their hunt for objects, untouched since they were lost hundreds or even thousands of years ago. Jutten is about men in boots mudlarking the bank of the Scheldt river in Antwerp, in search of shards of the past, the larking, the scouring, the scavenging. One tea towel after another filled with coins, marbles, pipes.

"Finds have a strange hold over us. There’s a magic to them that shines on a lot longer than the soon fading glimmer of things we intentionally choose. That purposefulness is probably what kills our enthusiasm after a week or so. Because when we make a choice, there’s too much of ourselves in the object already. We don’t deem a consciously picked item deserving of a tea towel display. The more trash we’ve dug through to get to our treasure, the more it becomes. Hence the mud-crusted trouvailles. So we go hunting for crap that’s out of place. Crap that becomes a find, simply because it was lost." - extract from a text by Annelies Desmet & Jill Mathieu

As a child, Bram Vav Meervelde dreamed of becoming a paleontologist. Of digging through eternal layers in search for shark teeth, the more the better, with the childish (Or, should it read: philosophical?) marvel at the number of sharks that must have swum there, at the banks of that very familiar, sharkless Scheldt. Amazed by and in adoration of how one can look in the present at the past. How something as ordinary as the Scheldt almost points directly to such magic. Endlessly stratified and dripping with stories, reality surpasses any fiction. The world is chaos, and even more: beautiful chaos. The beauty and virtuosity of a window covered in paint which has started to crackle and flake off after years and years of exposure to the elements almost moves one to tears, doesn’t it?