If you’ve ever dropped a possession into a river or waterway, you probably thought it would be gone forever. But one project in Amsterdam has rescued hundreds of thousands of weird and wonderful things from the depths of the city’s canals – and immortalised them in a new online exhibition.
It all started in 2003, when one of the canal riverbeds needed to be drained and excavated to make way for a new Metro line. During the digging, some 700,000 objects were discovered, spanning the 700-year history of the city – and now 20,000 of them are on display online, as part of the fascinating project called ‘Below the Surface’.
Several sections of the city’s waterways were excavated, and it was Damrak and Rokin on the Amstel, one of Amsterdam’s main canals, that yielded the richest deposits.
There’s even an option to ‘create your own display’, where you can collate some of your favourite random pieces into a work of art, just for the fun of it.
