This morning I was researching the naming of water bodies in the Netherlands. I noticed how many Dutch terms reflect just how deeply the country is shaped by its relationship with water. Two words stood out to me: plas and meer. Plas refers to a manmade lake, while meer refers to a natural one, or one that originated from a natural body of water. The name Sloterplas, for example, literally means “an artificial lake of Sloten.”

Language is a form of categorization. A system that, in this context, reflects how water is managed and ordered. Sloterplas, filled in the 1950s, was originally excavated to supply sand for raising the surrounding residential area.

On the website of the Municipality of Amsterdam, Sloterplas is officially categorized as a type of “water.” The description reads:

“The name is derived from the Slotermeer, a lake between Sloten and Sloterdijk, which was dug back into water after repeated draining for sand extraction. This water is the Sloterplas.”^*

In the field of art and artistic research, water landscapes are often explored through their ecological and social entanglements. In many Indigenous knowledge systems, rivers are sacred. They are seen as living entities, deeply connected to the lives of the people around them. There is often a profound sense of kinship and reverence for these waters, woven into daily life and spirituality.

But places like Sloterplas—artificial lakes created as part of industrialized civilization—rarely evoke that kind of emotional or cultural grounding. These waters were not shaped by the slow movements of nature, but by the urgency of function. Earth was excavated. Waterways were engineered. Not meandering or curved like riverbeds formed over centuries, but drawn in straight lines. They were inserted into the city as infrastructure, defined by hydrogeographic terms. Their naming marks their beginning, as if the act of giving a name was enough to make them belong.

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* “De naam is ontleend aan het Slotermeer, een meer tussen Sloten en Sloterdijk, dat na herhaalde droogleggingen ten behoeve van de zandwinning weer tot water werd gegraven. Dit water is de Sloterplas.” (from Gemeente Amsterdam, accessed on 24 Jun 2025) ↩