Ego and Ega of Zeewolde

When the Flevopolder had only just been drained and was called the youngest land in the Netherlands, in the early 1980s artists came from all corners of the world to set up their works there. At the end of 1987 the American Tim Hawkinson placed two concrete figures by the Wolderwijd. Ego, male, on the Flevoland bank. Ega, female, on the Veluwe bank, diagonally opposite Ego, a kilometre and a half away. Both had an open heart in the chest.

The artist said: «They are two selves looking at each other. Whoever sees them properly from a distance sees how Ego and Ega — in Latin both «I» and «wife» — stand opposite each other unable to reach each other.» The province paid, the press wrote. Then it was forgotten.

Twenty years later, in the 2010s, a story came up in the Zeewolde youth magazines. Whoever walked at dusk in June and July on the Veluwe-side dyke and looked at Ego saw how Ego slowly lifted his heart out of his chest, held it before him for a second, and put it back — as if sending something to Ega. And if you turned and looked at Ega, you saw that she too lifted her heart briefly from her chest — in answer.

No camera ever confirmed it. Anyone who tried to film it saw on the screen only motionless concrete. But anyone who went to look with his own eyes, saw it. Zeewolde’s youth soon discovered it served as a love-test: if you went in the evening with your new boyfriend or girlfriend to Ego and you both saw the heart move, it was serious. If only one of you saw it, the affair did not go far.

The municipality of Zeewolde now has the sculptures on TripAdvisor, and walkers from Amsterdam drive out for the right evening light. The folk saga of the changing heart was included in 2018 in the textbook «Stories of Flevoland» for primary school, alongside the older stories of Schokland and Urk — strangely, for here on the polder everything is new. But in Zeewolde they say: «It doesn’t matter that the polder is only sixty years old. People find sagas everywhere, even where there is no history.»

The artist Hawkinson died in 2024, at a great age. His sculptures still stand. And Zeewolde’s youth still claim to this day, even in 2026, that the hearts move at dusk. Perhaps they live the love-faith themselves, in a land that could inherit no folk-faith of its own.