Stella Maris takes its name from a former monastery on the edge of Welberg, a Dutch village of roughly five hundred houses and eleven hundred residents. In 2016, the photographers Geisje van der Linden and Miriam Donkers published a sustained body of work about the people who now live there: some four hundred Eastern European migrant workers, most of them Polish, housed by an employment agency that bought and renovated the building. The photographers followed the residents as they came and went, and the resulting book, with a text by Dore van Duivenbode, is a study of a place built to hold a workforce at a deliberate distance from the community around it.
The book describes a self-contained world. Apartments are assigned by employer and furnished to a uniform standard; a grocery store, bowling alley, bar, party room and fitness room keep daily life inside the monastery’s walls. The agency’s stated aim is to organize its residents’ lives humanely, with ordinary working weeks and holidays, and the photographs give a clear account of that provision. What they also record are the terms of the arrangement: a buffer between village and workers, one that keeps the newcomers from disturbing Welberg and leaves intact the question of whether they are wanted.
Van der Linden and Donkers work across public rooms, bedrooms and living rooms, and they make portraits of the young men and women who pass through. The publication sets the monastery and the village side by side, each closed to the other. Rob van Hoesel’s design is central to the argument, anonymizing the workers so that the book withholds the individual recognition that conventional portraiture would extend.
The results appeared as a 112-page softcover in the Eriskay Connection’s list, at 170 by 240 millimeters. For a collector, the value lies in that combination: a long-term documentary commitment, a clear-eyed subject, and a design that does not merely illustrate the research but shapes how the reader understands proximity and separation. [word count: approximately 320]
