De muren hebben oren

Adriënne Verburg

"De benen nemen" (to take to one's legs/to bolt)—why do we say it that way? Instead of just saying "I'm leaving"? At the same time, people are judged if they don't speak "correct" Dutch. We accept all sorts of crazy proverbs, yet a tiny grammatical error can sometimes be enough to dismiss someone.I am fascinated by how we communicate with one another. How we take it for granted. How words follow rules, how objects communicate with us, and how we, in turn, interpret them. And then there are those proverbs, which often describe things whose meaning is no longer literal at all. Do we truly understand each other, or is that not the case and are we just pretending? In my work, I look for the confusion within proverbs sometimes by depicting them literally, sometimes by changing something small about them.