96 pages Edited by Ilja van Dalen 21 x 29,7 cm Language: Dutch Paperback Publisher: Self-Published 2002
Widely recognised as the first real book devoted to Dutch graffiti, In Holland Staat Een Piece is Ilja van Dalen's own compilation — photographed, edited and published single-handedly — of pieces from across the Netherlands. It carries no text at all: only flicks, page after page of colour photographs of work painted on the country's walls through the 1980s and 1990s. The title sets the tone for the whole series, a deadpan pun on the Dutch nursery rhyme In Holland staat een huis — here it is not a house that stands in Holland, but a piece.
Its focus is the fixed surface: the wall, the static piece, the ground-level record of a national scene at the moment it first turned to look at itself in print. Where the later In Holland Rijdt Een Piece would put the work in motion on trains and trams, this founding volume is the still image of the movement — the primary document from which everything that followed was measured. Assembled from the inside by one of the scene's own, it remains a cornerstone reference for the history of Dutch writing.
