High art in the Low Counties

The gift wasn’t gratefully received at first, with locals objecting to the plans for the building. “We had a referendum and the people said no,” says museum worker Rouke van der Hoek. “But it got here anyway; we opened in 2013.”

The Fries Museum plays a starring role in Leeuwarden 2018, hosting exhibitions dedicated to two of the city’s most famous children: Escher, the graphic artist (April 28-Oct 28); and Mata Hari, whose dance shows seduced Europe in the early 1900s (until April 2).

Also at the museum is the Phantom Limb exhibition (until Jan 2019), which features work from new artists who, like Escher, excel in the art of deception.

In 1917 Mata Hari was shot by firing squad in Paris for allegedly being a German spy, but she continues to seduce thanks to the Fries Museum’s fantastic exhibition, which tells of her rise and fall through 3D projections, newspaper cuttings and official letters, some of them only declassified in 2017.

Like Mata Hari, Friesland has shown itself to be a master of reinvention: the province, of which Leeuwarden is the capital, used to be underwater, but hundreds of years ago its people started pegging back the sea with dykes and building on reclaimed land.

But can they keep fighting the tide? As sea levels rise the dykes will have to get bigger if Friesland is to avoid a Mata Hari ending. One man responsible for bolstering flood defences is artist Joop Mulder, who I meet at Grand Café, where he strains ginger tea through a walrus-esque ’tache. He wants to turn humanity’s response to climate change into art, which is why, when he builds his first dyke in nearby Wadden, a Unesco World Heritage Site, it will be in the shape of a naked woman.

“It will represent the strength of Mother Earth,” he says. “She will protect us from the water.” Mulder is developing other ideas, too – for piers, swimming pools, amphitheatres – with local communities as part of a project called Sense of Place.

The idea of finding artistic solutions to environmental and social problems is the cornerstone of Leeuwarden 2018, which is about not just one city, but a province: Friesland, a region shaped by people who moved the sea to build cities; it has its own flag, language and heroes, but no hills.

“I do miss hills,” says Claudia Woolgar, the creative producer of Leeuwarden 2018, originally from Sussex. Claudia and I met in prison, a beautiful, 19th-century clink in the centre of Leeuwarden recently converted into a theatre, library, restaurant and the Alibi hostel,

A Friesland street festival, left; Leeuwarden’s city library, right; Mata Hari, below