The church lies beautifully situated on the edge of a woods, half way between Jubbega and Oldeberkoop. The church is somewhat isolated, and accessible by a dirt road from the through road (N380 - Schoterlandseweg) between Nieuwehorne and Donkerbroek.

"Our point of departure is the threshold of a small farm house on the Middendijk, near Usquert, in Groningen's Noordpolder, the most northerly part of the Netherlands. We bought the dwelling from Jos Nienhuis, a biologist who had cut off the water, gas and telephone when he bought the house in 1980, to begin his own experiment with low-energy living. Nienhuis was part of a second wave of free spirits who came to the Groningen countryside, after the war. In the 1920s the avant-garde painters of De Ploeg were the first to ‘discover’ this landscape, and show it in their painting.
“On the Middendijk Nienhuis engaged in an idealistic struggle against the thistles which arrived along with the consolidation of the traditional fields. Without natural enemies, these aggressive plants spread explosively, which led the farmers to begin using herbicides against them. Nienhuis saw this as a morbid result of the commercialization of land. He therefore pulled them up by hand, because one was legally obliged to combat them. His little farm,with a hectare of land, grew into a place with wild woodlands in the middle of the land being employed for agrarian production, with its rigid lines.
"Since 2012 our house on the Middendijk has been an atelier where the relevance of the legacy of Jos Nienhuis for our times is being tested. It is a starting point for collecting stories from this vicinity. We do that in cooperation with residents and institutions in the area, and people from all over The Netherlands."

You can follow the project on atelieraandemiddendijk.wordpress.com.

Participants

Atelier aan de Middendijk is a project of Dirk-Jan Visser, Thijs Middeldorp, Joost Janmaat and Christian Ernsten. They invite artists to work in the atelier that is managed by the De Middendijk Foundation. For more information: 06 10144674.