We (don’t) Want Wind

• Installation during Dutch Design Week 19-27 October 2024.
• Installation Wind Pavilions at the exhibition Sustainable Dutch Design at the Netherlands Open Air Museum in 2024.
• Culturalized Wind Power, part of the exhibition Signs of (un)making – Temporary Art Centre, Eindhoven 2021.

The windmill is an icon of Dutch identity. Tourists from all over the world visit Kinderdijk and Zaanse Schans. But modern wind turbines actually provoke a lot of resistance. Why is that? How can we learn from the past and give modern wind turbines a more positive image? The installation We (don’t) Want Wind raises these questions, built in collaboration with creative engineer Nikolai Gillissen.

Commissioned by Artez Future Makers and the Netherlands Open Air Museum, Noud Sleumer examined modern large wind turbines. The enormous blades are not easy to dismantle and are almost impossible to recycle. Most of them end up in landfill, sometimes only because they are replaced by even larger ones, because that gives more yield. Are we building ever larger wind turbines for sustainability reasons or from an economic perspective?

Noud Sleumer then delved into the archives of the Dutch Open Air Museum and studied the centuries-old relationship that the Netherlands has with wind and wind energy. In addition, he investigated, in collaboration with the RIVM (National Institute for Public Health and the Environment), which aspects influence the support for wind energy. What did he find? There was also criticism of windmills in the past. But the residents around the mills themselves benefited from them: flour, wood or regulation of the water level. They knew the miller, the mills had a name, and the blades were used to pass on messages: a birth, a death or a party in the village. It is precisely these social and cultural factors that are often forgotten in the rational, technocratic approach of today’s large wind turbines.

To visualize the dilemmas surrounding the theme of wind energy, Noud Sleumer collected vases and pots of Delft Blue with images of old Dutch mills and used them to build an installation of small-scale wind turbines. This installation was on display for several months at an exhibition in the Dutch Open Air Museum and formed the basis for the presentation during the Dutch Design Week 2024.