Hear what Maaike Muis experienced from a man moving sand at the Holland Festival

One of the lesser-known and therefore hidden gems of this Holland Festival can be found in the Transformatorhuis of Amsterdam's Westergasfabriek. In that space, a single artist spends six hours every day shovelling 40 tonnes of sand from one pile to another. It sounds strange, but those who are there are experiencing something very special. 

Maaike Muis, Culture Press' special reporter for this Holland Festival, went there and sat in for a few hours. She was not bored, quite the contrary. She wants to go and see it more often. Listen to why in this excerpt from the podcast: "I go as a kind of processing, homage to life almost. Maybe a way of grasping the absurdity of life after all. By moving forty tonnes of sand six hours a day. And he also does it with a very nice soundtrack. Sometimes it seems like the doors of the dungeon are closing and at the same time there are sometimes songs by a Montreal band, Dear Criminals, that are very beautiful and moving. And I thought, OK, he's going to shovel from left to right and that's already special, but he does a lot more with it. There are lots of ways you can move sand. And it's not just about that sand, but also about the tasks, the things, the drudgery that we all recognise as human beings."