Coldest Days / Koudste Dagen was conceived for the outdoor exhibition Voorlopers in the Gardens of Soestdijk Palace. The first ice houses in The Netherlands were constructed in these gardens during the 18th and 19th century. Ice houses were a pre-electric innovation to preserve food and medicine, but they were also used more leisurely, as a way to have a cold drink during the summer for example. One could say that an ice house is an adaptation of natural processes for cultural purposes, which is echoed in Lahuis' installation for this exhibition in which a sentence erupts in steam at regular intervals.
The ice house of Soestdijk Palace, that can be found near this installation, consists of a modest hill under which soil, hay and bricks form the insulation for ice blocks that were cut out during the winter from the nearby pond. These ice blocks were stacked in the ice house and would slowly melt away, usually lasting until the end of summer, creating a relatively long-lasting, refrigerated space. This process could be described as a way of slowing down time in order to hang on to those coldest days of the year just a little bit longer. The sentence that appears and disappears every 7 seconds is a poetic reflection on this history and reads almost as a hymn to those, increasingly rare, coldest days;
Onder de geplooide en gebakken aarde is waar
de koudste dagen zijn bewaard en begraven.
Under pleated and fired earth is where
the coldest days have been buried and preserved.
