The sporen / traces / spuren left behind by herman de vries in a landscape that he loves are minimal texts, loose words, signs, symbols, an old cosmic riddle. He calls them "philosophical fragments - fragmentary philosophy. no system! that would be a prison. freedom is a precondition for knowledge. relations are there to be discovered, to be created by a free reader her/himself. it is not without reason that these texts are to be found in nature, in the woods: there are relationships from place to place everywhere [or: all over]. the woods as a suitable space, biotope, for contemplation. walking, moving, searching, finding as a way of getting to know and perhaps along the way you discover something more important than what you are looking for.” These traces appear outside of the actual exhibition space and invite to be here. They appear and disappear, are discovered or go unnoticed, perhaps only discovered and seen much later, by different people each time. herman de vries indicates and invites any person to a poetic moment in the here and now, a moment in a stream, a point of attention within an ever-moving whole (Cees de Boer, mei 2021).

The music piece below from Sigita Zurauskaite (1990, Lithuania) and Marnix Sixma (1991, The Netherlands) is part of one of the artworks in this manifestation. They got inspired by herman de vries’ mantras – short poems with a meditative nature – and decided to collaborate. They started making sound recordings at multiple locations in the city of Groningen, of which they chose short fragments that sounded like mantras on their own. These ‘sound mantras’ in turn became a foundation to create music, capturing the essence of each location while at the same time replying to de vries’ body of work. The end result is four music pieces which are connected by a route of QR codes through the city of Groningen. Together, they form an invitation to stand still for a moment and look closely at the city itself; the present-day ‘nature’ that Groningen has to offer to its citizens.