Rampsporen = Traces of Disaster

Disasters are unforgettable events. Or so we think. But what if the people directly involved are gone, where does the memory of such events reside? And how is this memory accessed? On this site, we invite you to explore with us, students from the University of Amsterdam, how previous disasters in the Netherlands left their trace on the Dutch cultural landscape. What practices of memorialization exist? Is it easy to recognize the event years later, when make our way through these same locations? And when encountering these traces, how do we react and experience these places?

Rampsporen.nl has archived our short papers, expressing brief anthropological fieldwork on traces of disaster done for a bachelor’s course. We hope that our stories inspire. Not only to provide opportunities for those directly involved to remember, but also to remain aware of the importance of conserving lessons from the past in order to build a resilient future.