‘He said he wasn’t that good a dancer, but the instructions were clear. He just had to follow the spiral line on GPS. It might work, but only if every farmer along the road would join in.’

Tractordans (Tractor dance) is a project by Neeltje ten Westenend carried out by the farmers of the Rijnlanderweg, Haarlemmermeer. On Saturday afternoon, September 20, 2014, you could see tractors dancing on a lot on the Geniedijk in Hoofddorp.

The event brought the farmers together in a spiral-shaped course designed by Ten Westenend, plotted in GPS. A simple choreographic intervention that zooms in on the physical properties of the polder landscape as well as on individual farmers. The stately grid of the plots was temporarily broken by a circular movement of colored tractors.
In Ground, moving in lines and circles, Tractordans is again highlighted and supplemented with new work. Neeltje ten Westenend continues her investigation of the Rijnlanderweg in a cinematic triptych and together with photographer Stephan Keppel she once again takes a look at the agricultural machinery, the soil, patterns and rhythms. Stephan Keppel developed a series of prints especially for this exhibition in which the abstraction of basic images (the background of the trail) enter into a relationship with paper and space.