The Hallucinarium of Elisabeth Stift Kerkrade
(Murals in the abandoned chapel of this monastery, painted in my signature surrealist style)*
Cultural Heritage
A small brook in an ancient Roman valley of South Limburg. On one side, an elongated sloping forest; on the opposite ridge, gentler hills. This fertile cradle with abundant water witnessed Roman watchtowers fade, only for medieval lords to build "s'HerenAnstel" castle - itself plucked away by time. When Bismarck expelled Catholic orders during the "Kulturkampf", a neo-Gothic monastery grew here like a stubborn weed. Now abandoned by nuns, this architectural pearl - cradled in breathtaking landscape - finds new guardians in passionate locals fighting to preserve it. The chapel exhales meditation and peace: the perfect vessel for making history tangible.
For this building sits atop an undug treasure -
a "Hallucinarium".
The Treasure Chest
For centuries, this southeastern Dutch frontier - laced with streams and threaded by the Roman Tongeren-Cologne road - was fiercely contested. Mysterious lands where earth itself could burn. Where medieval castle sieges were broken through secret tunnels. Where witch doctors practiced their craft.
No wonder a wandering monk saw divine providence in the hilltop spring. "Clear the forest," came the order - thus "Kloosterrath" was born. The land changed hands endlessly: Spanish troops and Protestant mercenaries shifting fronts between Kerkrade and Heerlen; Austrian then French occupiers coming and going. Local farmers, eternally supplying cannon fodder for foreign nobles' wars, learned to distrust all authority - smuggling and poaching binding communities tighter than any law.
After Napoleon's fall at Waterloo, Europe was redrawn: Kloosterrath split into Dutch "Kerkrade" and German "Herzogenrath". Then coal transformed the sleepy village into a soot-choked industrial town. When the mines closed, the monastery fell into Sleeping Beauty's slumber... until now, when whispers of cyclical time stir again in this mythic soil.
Mythic Primordial Land
Peer through time's keyhole at the Netherlands: only this deep south teems with life while ice grips the north. These warm hills were eternal hunting grounds. The souls of millennia weave an intangible cultural consciousness into our very bodies - visible in strangers' eyes yet impossible to grasp. It's the taste of life "and" suffering. Forgotten dramas. A field of dream images. Like existence itself: meaningful only when felt through the heart's golden thread to our ancestors.
Here, silence carries art.
A tree's perception might reveal:
"Water and earth. Fire and frost. Humans with their axes. For us too, life is brief - dangerous sapling years, few survivors. Our slow dance of branching roots. Chemical whispers between kin. Flowering and fruiting."
Interpretation: Time That Denies Itself
What if silence isn't absence of sound, but time choking on itself?
This chapel isn't where past and present alternate, but collide - like quarreling siblings denying shared blood. The trees, ancient witnesses, know: human culture is but a brief fever in earth's body.
This Place's Paradox:
The harder we try to "preserve" history here, the faster it escapes.
- Neo-Gothic walls whisper not of piety, but Bismarck's refugees - a monastery born of political exile, now revered as heritage
- The "saved" chapel feels like defeat - we keep stones alive but can't resuscitate their original faith
- Miners digging coal here unknowingly excavated something else: proof we're just another temporary layer
Would these trees recognize us if we stayed centuries? Unlikely. To them, we're as ephemeral as medieval monks or Napoleonic soldiers - mere seasonal infestations.
The True Hallucinarium:
Not what we paint "on" walls, but what walls paint "in" us:
1. "Preservation" is illusion - we only save what's already gone
2. Every attempt to arrest time paradoxically accelerates it
3. The uneasy sense we're already part of what future generations will "restore"
Art here doesn't silence time - it unmasks time as fraud. These murals will fade like the mines did. Deep in the marl, the earth laughs: it knows it will digest us too, transforming our remains into whatever future pilgrims will venerate.
The final paradox? The harder we try to remain, the clearer it becomes we've already left.