Eva Gjaltema (b. 1979) looks back on her childhood in Stadskanaal, after 12 years of living in the Randstad. At the time she had been unable to recognise the deprived social-economic conditions which the region had experienced for generations, and which still characterised the years when she was in primary school in the 1980s, because she then had no basis for making a comparison. With the present economic crisis as her jumping-off point, Eva went in search of similarities with the recession of the 1980s. She investigates the region's identity, beginning with her own recollections and those of her classmates, with whom she again sought contact. In particular, she follows the life of her former classmate Jan Kruize, who still lives in the area with his family.

The family of the Dutch photographer Eva Gjaltema comes from the Westerkwartier, a rural area on the border between the provinces of Groningen and Friesland, where they have been active for gen-erations in agriculture and raising livestock. In 2004 Gjaltema began to record the lives of her grandparents, in order to preserve the family's history, but also to show a way of life that was dying. Using various techniques and cameras, she expresses feelings of love, sorrow, anger and power-lessness. For this she draws on her own images, but also documents and photographs from the fam-ily archive. The result is a dialogue between generations, and an ode to a way of life symbolic of the whole countryside of the Northern Netherlands.