Het Witte Wieven Archief (2025)

Het Witte Wieven Archief (2025) is a growing collection of stories, places, and traces tied to the Witte Wieven: ghost-like women from Dutch folklore said to dwell in hills, swamps, and forests. Once seen as powerful and different (midwives, herbalists, wise women) their knowledge was forgotten, their names erased. Over time, they returned as legend, as mist, as a memory of what once was.

Het Witte Wieven Archief is a continuation of the project the search for The Invisible Women (2023). The archive will serve as a tool for the public to visit the Witte Wieven. It is both a tribute to the unseen spirits of these myths and a quiet warning for the Netherlands and her way of story conservation: soon, we may only remember them through photographs and scattered words, no longer through the landscapes .

It started as a scavenger hunt- a way to return to the magic I believed in as a child. My grandparents told me stories of trolls, fairies, and ghosts from around the world- and they really believed in them too. I started to pass those stories on to my siblings, showing them the “evidence” I had gathered to support my stories. I want to believe this as an adult as well, but sometimes it’s hard to let go of my rational side. So I visit these landscapes in my rational country, in search for the escape my grandparents gave me once. And I found it back in the Witte Wieven.

In this work I move between belief and doubt, between the urge to prove and the need to preserve mystery. But the Witte Wieven resist explanation, as one of the few mysterious stories left in the Netherlands. Their presence lingers in stones, trees, water, and soil: quiet witnesses of all that has passed. Teaching me about our history, heritage, collective memory and the role (ghost)women seem to have in our folk stories.

This archive traces and reimagines their stories: to remember, to visit, and to protect what might still be hiding in plain sight. And maybe to believe, just a little, again.

This project is funded by CBK Rotterdam, Amarte fonds & Rotterdam Photo