Paper short abstract:

This project traces the hydro-figurations in the Dutch infrastructure by examining Normaal Amsterdams Peil, its historical origin and contemporary iterations. Infrastructural arrangements that negotiate water depths exist in tension with elemental forces operating in the inhabited waterscape.

Paper long abstract:

Hydro-figurations play out in the Netherlands, the turbulent delta between the big rivers and rising sea. Normaal Amsterdams Peil (NAP), born in Amsterdam, provides an imagined water level for Dutch infrastructure and a reference for the whole of Europe. Situated in elemental encounters of today, this paper visits the conjunctures where the dimension of water depth is relevant to contemporary matters of survival.

I explore the elemental forces in water versus land, solid versus fluid, and height versus depth. This is unravelled by revisiting NAP's historical development in the 17th and 19th centuries, encoding the memories of tidal floods and state formation. In the process, the elemental force of mercantile capital flow also conditioned the compartmentalisation and control of Amsterdam waters. However, behind dams and dikes, we still plunge in and resurface from imagined and factual rising and falling water levels. I argue for a metonymical turn in figuring water.

By treating Dutch waters and flows as elemental actants in the infrastructure, this project seeks to complicate Dutch waterscapes and pluralise the water ontologies, furthering watery materialities of depth as a nuanced theoretical dimension and a metonymy for the living space. In the operations of hydro-figuration of depth, we see more than floods or flooded subjects; we also see strategies and adaptions in the webbed relations and agencies of the present and future.