Cartography as Statecraft — Statecraft

Summary

The central work of the Dutch cartographer Carlijn Kingma — The Waterworks of Money (2022) and De Machinerie van de Volkshuisvesting (The Machinery of Housing Provision, 2025) — is analysed in this essay as contemporary statecraft in images. The thesis is threefold. First: Kingma’s practice is not illustrative but institutional. She produces architectural diagnoses of state institutions that function as spatial arguments and that meet the three criteria the authors of the Finance and Space article identify as conditions for democratic transformation: systemic literacy, the capacity to envisage alternative architectures, and continuous political engagement.¹ Second: the work stands in a continuum of political iconography that runs from Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Allegoria del Buon e Cattivo Governo (1338–39) via Otto Neurath’s ISOTYPE (Vienna and The Hague, 1925–1945) and the American-Italian architectural-utopian tradition of Frank Lloyd Wright and Paolo Soleri (1932–1969 and beyond) to Constant Nieuwenhuys’ New Babylon (1956–1974). Kingma synthesises Lorenzetti’s normative framework, Neurath’s didactic ambition, the iconographic-architectural register of Wright and Soleri, and Constant’s imaginative power in a single coherent oeuvre. Third: this synthesis takes place within an institutional constellation in which the separation between art, science and policy is crossed, in line with the triangle Judi Mesman formulates in her essay for New New Babylon as a condition for a just future.² The work is thereby statecraft in the strict sense of designing, understanding and recalibrating state institutions, and at the same time a political-iconographic intervention in the democratic deliberative process.

The essay closes with a brief reflection on the tension this position raises — that institutional cartography co-produced with the very institutions it analyses runs the risk of developing from critique into legitimation — and on how Kingma’s practice relates to it.

1. The question

The question is whether Kingma’s two central works can be read as statecraft, and if so, in what way. Statecraft is understood here in two connected senses. In the classical sense it is the craft of governing, the design of state institutions and the maintenance of legitimate authority — a tradition running from Machiavelli’s Il Principe (1513) via the Federalist authors to the contemporary institutional design of Elinor Ostrom, Vincent Ostrom and Bo Rothstein. In the modern critical sense it is the set of techniques by which the state renders itself and its subjects visible and governable, a tradition given its sharpest formulation by James C. Scott in Seeing Like a State (1998). Scott calls this technique legibility, and describes how states — through cartography, registration, the standardisation of measures, cadastres and surnames — simplify complex social realities into what is governable for the central authority.³

Kingma’s practice relates to these traditions in two ways. She reverses Scott’s arrow. Where the premodern state was blind to its subjects and the modern state made itself legible by making its subjects legible, Kingma makes the state legible to its citizens. Her maps are inverted cadastres. The architectural diagnosis of money creation or of the housing system is an instrument with which citizens can survey and understand the institutions that structure their lives. The work thereby functions as counter-cartography in the sense of Denis Wood and John Pickles, but without their activist polemic. It is constructive counter-cartography, which not only lays bare the existing architecture but simultaneously makes another architecture thinkable.

Beyond this, Kingma engages explicitly in institutional design in the classical sense. In Waterworks, the three future scenarios — The Valley of Debt-Free Money, The Agora of Democratic Money and The Republic of a Thousand Coins — are each elaborated proposals for a fundamentally different monetary order, based respectively on the Chicago Plan of 1933, Varoufakis’ Another Now, and the free-banking and community-currency tradition of Hayek and Lietaer.⁴ In De Machinerie van de Volkshuisvesting the prescriptive half is implicit, made explicit in the animation and accompanying publication, but the diagnosis present follows the method of an institutional analysis that could have been drawn up by March, Olsen and Ostrom.

The question, then, is not whether the work is statecraft, but which mode of statecraft it embodies. The answer is that it is deliberative statecraft: a political iconography that seeks to be a precondition for democratic redesign.

2. Four traditions of political iconography

To place Kingma’s position she must be compared with four predecessors, each of whom prepared a different aspect of her practice. The four are not cited by Kingma as such — with the exception of Constant, via the exhibition New New Babylon — but they explain the architecture of her oeuvre better than her own list of examples (Brueghel, Piranesi, Gandy, Amman) does.

2.1 Lorenzetti: government as visual argument

Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s fresco Allegoria ed effetti del Buono e del Cattivo Governo, painted between February 1338 and May 1339 in the Sala dei Nove of the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, is the primal scene of political iconography in the Western tradition.⁵ The work was commissioned by the Nine, the executive magistracy of the Republic of Siena, and adorned the council chamber in which they discussed their policy. The composition consists of three connected planes. On the north wall, the personifications of Good Government (Pax, Fortitudo, Prudentia, Magnanimitas, Temperantia, Justitia), flanking the throne of the Commune. On the east wall, the effects of Good Government in city and countryside: a prosperous Siena in which trade, construction, dance and harvest flourish. On the west wall, the effects of Bad Government: a city ruled by Tyrannia, with murder, plunder and devastated fields.

For Kingma, Lorenzetti is relevant for three reasons. First, because he is the first to make the art of government a pictorial subject on a scale and with an ambition exceeding the individual scene. The fresco is not the illustration of a treatise but a treatise in fresco, an argument about institutional quality that confronted the magistrates daily. Second, because the scale and placement function politically. The work stands in the room where governors sat; it expects sustained viewing by those who operate the institutions. Third, because it is diagnostic and normative at once. The north wall names the virtues, the east wall shows their effects, the west wall the alternative.

Kingma reproduces this triptych in contemporary form. The Waterworks main map is the west wall, a diagnosis of what is. The three future scenarios are the east wall, the effects of better institutional choices. The implicit north wall — the virtues — is the scholarly anchoring of the work: the literature study of Baradaran, Gorton, Mellor, Piketty, Ricks, Soddy, Fisher and the contemporary complexity economics of Brian Arthur that Van der Linden, Bollen and Kingma set out in their Finance and Space article.⁶ Lorenzetti and Kingma share the premise that an institutional order is not self-evident but the result of political choices that can be captured in images and thereby made discussable.

What distinguishes them is the audience. Lorenzetti worked for the Nine, a closed oligarchic college that confirmed and disciplined itself in images. Kingma works for the public, for everyone who sees the work in a museum, in a pavilion or on a poster. It is statecraft addressed to the whole citizenry, not to an executive caste, and in that she stands closer to Neurath than to Lorenzetti.

2.2 Neurath: pictographic statecraft for the citizen

Between 1925 and 1934, in the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum in Vienna, Otto Neurath developed what was first called the Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics and after 1934 ISOTYPE, the International System of Typographic Picture Education.⁷ The project arose in the context of Red Vienna, the socialist municipal governments that between 1919 and 1934 carried out a comprehensive programme of social housing, healthcare and popular education. Neurath — a member of the Vienna Circle and founder of logical positivism as a movement — designed, together with the artist Gerd Arntz and the “transformer” Marie Reidemeister (later Neurath), a visual language of standardised pictograms intended to make statistical data on income, health, housing stock and labour legible for a broad public, including its semi-literate parts.

ISOTYPE is the most direct precedent for Kingma for two reasons. First, the democratic intention. Neurath formulated in 1930 that the modern person receives their general education largely through images, films and illustrations, and that a method for using this systematically had so far been lacking. The aim was to create images that could be understood without words, a visual Esperanto.⁸ Second, the Dutch continuity. When Neurath fled Vienna in 1934 after the Dollfuss regime eliminated the social-democratic city council, he settled in The Hague, where he founded the International Foundation for Visual Education and continued his work, including exhibitions in the Bijenkorf department store. ISOTYPE is thus — contrary to what is often assumed — a tradition partly developed in the Netherlands, and it is no coincidence that Sandra Smets, in her NRC review of Fear of Falling in January 2026, named the line from Kingma to Neurath as the most striking comparison.

The difference between Neurath and Kingma is one of scale and register. Neurath worked with standardised pictograms that represented quantities through repetition: a graphic lexicon. Kingma works with unique architectural scenes that interlock into one synoptic metaphor. From Neurath she inherits the conviction that institutional transparency can be forced through images, and the conviction that this is a democratic precondition. She departs from him in her preference for the narrative total image over the modular data fragment.

2.3 Constant: utopian imagination as statecraft in retreat

Constant Nieuwenhuys’ New Babylon (1956–1974) is the third predecessor, and the most paradoxical.⁹ His project, designed on the margins of the Situationist International and later continued in his own practice, was a utopian megastructure in which all labour was automated, land was collective, and man — as nomadic homo ludens — moved from experience to experience, continuously building and rearranging in a worldwide labyrinthine network of plexiglass, wire and line. Zippora Elders, guest curator of New New Babylon, describes in her essay Constant spelen (Playing Constant) how the project was meant as the “creation of minimal conditions” for human creativity in a world where the “hard lines and cold abstraction” of post-war reconstruction could be filled with human expression.¹⁰

Constant’s work is utopian where Kingma’s is diagnostic, and its centre of gravity is thereby the opposite of hers. He shows what could be, not what is. But the relationship is deeper than opposition. Constant designed institutional alternatives in the same mode in which Kingma designs her three future scenarios. The difference is that Constant’s New Babylon appears without prior diagnosis, as a leap of the imagination, while Kingma’s scenarios always follow the diagnosis of the main map. Constant’s work is statecraft in retreat: a statecraft that abolishes the existing state and posits a post-state society in its place. Kingma’s work is statecraft in dialogue: a statecraft that X-rays the existing state and proposes reforms.

Their connection became literal in 2025 through Kingma’s inclusion in New New Babylon: Visions for Another Tomorrow at Kunstmuseum Den Haag (29 March through 31 August 2025), where her work was shown alongside that of 27 other artists around Constant’s central work.¹¹ Joke de Wolf, in her essay Een nieuw Babylon (A New Babylon), interprets Constant’s project as “a rendering of the reconstruction after the last judgement”, in which the apocalypse is taken in its literal sense: revelation.¹² The arrangement is apt. Where Constant works after the judgement, Kingma works with the judgement itself — with picturing the mechanisms that produce the current order, so that the judgement can be passed democratically.

2.4 Wright and Soleri: the American-Italian track

Alongside the European line runs a parallel architectural-utopian track, developed across two continents, which prepares the visual register of Kingma’s work more directly than the predecessors mentioned so far. Frank Lloyd Wright presented the concept of Broadacre City in 1932, a decentralised anti-urbanist alternative to the modernist dream of density, which he showed in 1935 as a large scale model in Rockefeller Center in New York. Wright’s project was statecraft in images in a specific direction: the deliberate dismantling of the great city in favour of a decentralised, individualist society of self-sufficient one-acre households, based on the car and the electrical infrastructure. His studios Taliesin (Wisconsin) and Taliesin West (Arizona) functioned simultaneously as school, studio and political-architectural laboratory, with the Wright apprenticeship as an institutional circuit of its own.

Paolo Soleri, born in Turin in 1919, was an apprentice at Taliesin West for eighteen months in 1947 and 1948, returned to Italy, and came back to Arizona in 1956, where he founded Cosanti and in 1970 began building the experimental town of Arcosanti, maintained to this day by the Cosanti Foundation. In Arcology: The City in the Image of Man (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1969), Soleri drove the Wrightian logic in the opposite direction. The book is a folio of fold-out hand-drawn sections of imaginary mega-cities, conceived as syntheses of architecture and ecology. An arcology is, in his definition, a vertically compact, energetically self-sufficient, ecologically closed urban form that fundamentally rejects Broadacre’s horizontal sprawl.

For Kingma this track is relevant for two reasons. First, because the visual register lies strikingly close to her work. Soleri’s large fold-out sections, in black and white, with a density of architectural ornament and human scale-figures scattered through the structure, form the most direct iconographic precedent of The Waterworks of Money. Whoever has Soleri on their bookshelf sees, at first glance at Kingma, her work emerging from the same graphic tradition. Second, because the Wright-Soleri axis makes two opposed statecraft visions explicit — the horizontal-individualist (Wright) and the vertical-collective (Soleri) — both drawn with the same ambition and in a shared visual register. That forces the viewer into taking a position, and it is precisely this forced positioning that also structures Kingma’s three Waterworks scenarios.

What Wright and Soleri share with Constant is pure speculativity. None of the three begins with a diagnosis of the existing institutional reality; all three design an alternative order from a primary statement of imagination. What Kingma adds is the first half they do not supply: the institutional diagnosis. Without Soleri’s iconographic tradition her work would be graphically weaker, but without her own analytical lead it would remain within that tradition and fail to fulfil the statecraft function. In terms of the architecture of her oeuvre, Kingma sits at the crossing of two diagonals: Lorenzetti-to-Neurath (normative plus didactic) and Constant-to-Soleri (imaginative plus iconographic).

3. The Finance and Space foundation

The scholarly backbone of Kingma’s monetary work is the article published in April 2025 in Finance and Space by Martijn van der Linden, Thomas Bollen and Carlijn Kingma herself, titled The Waterworks of Money: making money and finance accessible.¹³ The article is based on the Finance & Space Annual Lecture Van der Linden delivered in August 2024 at the RGS-IBG Annual Conference in London, and it provides a precise account of what the work claims to be and to do.

The core concept is systemic financial literacy, defined as “the ability to understand the structures, flows and interconnections of monetary, financial and fiscal systems, as well as their relationships with society”. The authors explicitly distinguish this systemic literacy from the conventional financial literacy used by the European Commission and the OECD, which has personal financial wellbeing as its goal (budgeting, saving, mortgage choice). Systemic literacy is collective and political. It “empowers individuals and communities to engage in informed critique, envision alternative architectures and drive systemic reform”. This is statecraft literacy in monetary clothing, not consumer education.

The article identifies eight mechanisms by which the existing architecture generates inequality, each located on a specific part of the main map. The first is unequal access to new liquidity: the top of the tower is supplied at favourable rates while the bottom has no connection to the banking system. The second is the privatised-gains-socialised-losses structure of shadow banking, with Kindleberger, Reinhart and Rogoff as sources. The third is central bank monetary policy, of which two pipelines (open market operations and standing facilities) are active while two others (monetary financing and helicopter money) remain inactive. The fourth is the dominance of financial value over other values via shareholder meetings and share buybacks, with Lazonick and O’Sullivan as source. The fifth is the regressive operation of the fiscal system, in which the wealthy can avoid their tax base via collateralised loans (see the ProPublica dossier on the IRS files of 2021). The sixth is the dominance of neoclassical economic theory in education, with De Muijnck and Tieleman as principal sources. The seventh is financialisation in the sense of Braun and Van der Zwan, visualised by the fact that the tower of society looks small relative to the surrounding financial landscape. The eighth is the deficit of accountability, visualised by a revolving door, an empty parliament and a suggestion box.

The analytical half of the work is closed in the article with a reflection that connects directly to Brian Arthur’s complexity economics. The authors state that “the architecture of the Waterworks is not a natural phenomenon but is ultimately the outcome of political choices”. Three preconditions are then indispensable for deep transformation: a high level of systemic literacy, a widespread capacity to envisage alternative architectures, and continuous political engagement. It is precisely in this triad that Kingma’s two works acquire their position as statecraft — not as policy plan but as democratic precondition.

4. The Waterworks of Money as institutional cartography

The main map, drawn between 2021 and 2022 on museum board of 100 by 148 centimetres, required 2,000 hours of drawing after a research phase of five years in which more than 200 experts from central banks, regulators, academia, pension funds, NGOs and activist movements were interviewed. The work was financed by the Creative Industries Fund NL and the Brave New Works Foundation, while Kingma was artist-in-residence at Rabobank. The composition follows a central vertical motif: a tower representing society, with big corporations (big retail, big pharma, big oil) in water reservoirs at the top and severe water shortage at the base. Around the tower, the entire monetary-financial-fiscal apparatus revolves as an irrigation system serving the tower.

The choice of the waterworks metaphor is methodologically decisive. It depicts money not as number or token but as flow, with all the implications of hydraulic pressure, irrigation, drainage and distributive capacity. The neoclassical conception of money as neutral medium of exchange is thereby abandoned, and the view opens onto the architecture that determines where money flows and where it does not. This connects to credit-creation theory as formulated by Werner and the Bank of England publication by McLeay et al. from 2014, and to Benjamin Braun’s asset-manager-capitalism paradigm. Both touch the core of what the contemporary Western monetary system, according to these authors, systematically produces.

For a Dutch reader with a background in public administration, the work has three additional resonances. First, it offers an explanatory framework for the paradox that the Dutch national budget (in the order of 460 billion euros in 2025) and municipal budgets are structurally under pressure, while the private wealth of Dutch households and non-financial corporations is above the European average and, in absolute terms, gigantic. The Waterworks shows why this is a matter of architecture, not of scarcity. Second, it explains the internationalisation of monetary policy and the resulting democratic deficit at national level, an issue explicitly addressed in the text around mechanism eight. Third, it offers a vocabulary for placing the fiscal architecture in which Dutch holding structures and foreign vehicles function within a broader political-economic framework, instead of seeing it exclusively as technical tax planning.

The reception of Waterworks proves the work’s operation as a democratic instrument. It has been shown at Rijksmuseum Twenthe (2022–2023), at Kunstmuseum Den Haag in the exhibition De toekomst van ons geld (The Future of Our Money, April–September 2023), in the Dutch pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale (2023, Plumbing the System, curated by Jan Jongert of Superuse Studios for Het Nieuwe Instituut), at the Boijmans Depot in collaboration with RaboArtLab (2024–2025), at Triodos Bank Zeist and at the Ministry of Finance. It won the Meesterverteller Prize (2022), the Dutch Design Award in the category Design Research (2023) and the Amsterdam Prize for the Arts, Work of the Year (2023). Rens van Tilburg of the Sustainable Finance Lab uses the work in the De Groene Amsterdammer series Plan van de Arbeid (Michiel Zonneveld, 24 April 2023) as evidence that the system is not inevitable, and the RaboResearch report by Van Leeuwen and Van der Linden (2024) uses the map as frame of reference for internal dialogue sessions.

What stands out is that the reception moves exactly along the fault line between art and policy that Mesman’s triangle of art, science and society describes as productive.¹⁴ The work is shuttled between museum, ministry, bank and political-journalistic platform without visible discomfort. That this happens without discomfort is itself a political-iconographic achievement.

5. De Machinerie van de Volkshuisvesting as path-dependency analysis

The second major work, completed in December 2025 in a format of 113 by 150 centimetres, is a further development of the same method applied to a different policy domain. It was co-produced with Bollen and research assistant Joost Kingma, with partners covering the full administrative and financial context of the Dutch housing system: the Province of Zuid-Holland, Triodos Bank, BNG Bank, the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area, Platform Woonopgave, the Ministry of Housing and Spatial Planning, the Dutch Green Building Council, transition bureau Squarewise and the investigative journalism platform Follow the Money. The exhibition design of the travelling pavilion was made by Sarah van der Giesen (On Show Studio) and Adriaan de Groot. The map was previewed in January 2026 at Brutus Art Space Rotterdam in the exhibition Fear of Falling, simultaneously with a survey exhibition at Gallery Untitled, and has since travelled past Atrium The Hague, the Provincial House of Zuid-Holland, Triodos Bank Zeist, the PROVADA real estate fair, the Ministry of Housing, and the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam, with as institutional crown the solo exhibition at Singer Laren from 30 June 2026 through 4 January 2027.

The composition orders the housing crisis as an institutional machine. At the top sit the winners — property owners, wealthy households with second homes, investors and banks — with the slogans “Why are you still renting?” and “Found your future”. Below them turns the gear-work of project developers, housing associations, municipalities and central government. At the base are tent camps and homeless counters. A core section of the map is a didactic grid of one hundred little houses, each representing one per cent of the 8.3 million Dutch dwellings, or 83,000 homes. From it, composition, income, wealth and housing costs can be read. The Follow the Money text accompanying the work cites, for the bottom 31 per cent (social housing), an average waiting time of seven years with outliers up to twenty years — a claim that for Amsterdam in 2024 came to 9.8 years according to the AFWC annual report 2025, and that Colliers in 2023 established at seventeen years for specific municipalities in the region (Landsmeer, Wormerland, Amstelveen).

The map connects five institutional mechanisms, each anchored in the academic literature. First, mortgage-driven money creation by commercial banks, in which new liquidity is pumped predominantly into existing assets, generating price inflation (a direct link with mechanisms one and seven of the Waterworks). Second, scarcity of building land, coupled with land speculation and municipal land policy. Third, the fiscal treatment of owner-occupied housing — the mortgage interest deduction, the “jubelton” (a tax-free gift for home purchase, since abolished) and the notional-return wealth tax — and the resulting wealth inequality. The Follow the Money text cites a ratio of eighty times more wealth for owners than for renters. Cody Hochstenbach arrives at ninety times in Uitgewoond (Das Mag, 2022). Statistics Netherlands reports, excluding the owner-occupied home, a median of fourteen times in 2020 — reflecting different methodological definitions but confirming the order of magnitude of the structural gap. Fourth, lagging energy renovation as a result of missing public financing and grid congestion. Fifth, the Thatcherite turn that structurally privatised the Dutch housing system around 1985–1995, a history summarised in the Follow the Money text as follows: social housing was thirteen per cent of the total just after the war, grew to over forty per cent in 1985, and has since fallen back to twenty-eight per cent market share according to the Woonbond, the Dutch tenants’ association, in 2025.

What the work does here is path-dependency analysis by other means. Path dependency is the concept Paul Pierson and Kathleen Thelen popularised in political science to explain why policy systems exhibit lock-in on the basis of early institutional choices, even when those choices prove unwise with hindsight. Kingma visualises that lock. Each part of the machinery explains why another part cannot simply be changed without cascade effects elsewhere.

For a quartermaster in the public sector this is conceptually familiar terrain. The Dutch youth care transition of 2015 is a textbook example of path dependency underestimated by policymakers. The decentralisation moved the financing but left the supply side, the incentive structures and the legal frameworks largely intact — with, as its well-known consequence, a ten-year debate about the right scale of procurement, the funding system and the governance of regional cooperation. What Kingma does for the housing crisis should ideally also be done for youth care, long-term care and the reform of the social domain. This explains why her work is received so eagerly in administrative circles. It supplies a vocabulary and a visual language for what civil servants and administrators experience daily but rarely get to see under one synoptic gaze.

6. Alternative architectures and the prescriptive half

The Finance and Space article makes explicit that the three Waterworks future scenarios were deliberately designed to privilege no single scenario and to provoke debate. This is a political-strategic choice that distinguishes the work from programmatic manifestos. The three scenarios represent three ideologically opposed routes to systemic reform.

The Valley of Debt-Free Money is the statist-public route, based on the Chicago Plan of Knight, Cox, Director, Douglas, Hart, Mints, Schultz and Simons from March 1933 and on contemporary elaborations by Benes and Kumhof (IMF), Ricks, Kotlikoff, Cochrane, McMillan and Fernández-Ordóñez. In this scenario, money creation is carried out exclusively by an independent Monetary Authority. A digital ledger serves as public means of payment and store of value for all citizens and firms. New money enters the economy directly through public channels, an excess-liquidity tax prevents excessive accumulation, and a Tobin tax limits financialisation. Public safety nets for financial institutions are abolished, which by definition eliminates the privatised-gains-socialised-losses structure.

The Agora of Democratic Money is the cooperative-deliberative route, developed in collaboration with Yanis Varoufakis on the basis of his Another Now (2020) and, more broadly, the commons movement. In this scenario, power over capital and firms is democratised. Citizens’ councils assess investments on social value, not creditworthiness. The governance rule is “one employee, one share, one vote”, and firms growing beyond 500 employees are split. Because shares are non-tradable, financial markets do not exist and financialisation is absent. The tax system consists of a corporate tax and a land tax.

The Republic of a Thousand Coins is the pluralist-libertarian route, developed in collaboration with free-banking adherents and initiators of community currencies, based on Hayek (Denationalisation of Money, 1990), White and Lietaer. In this scenario, every citizen and community can create its own currency. Digital technologies are used to programme social and ecological values into currencies. Central banks for public currencies do not exist, and losses can therefore no longer be socialised. Competition between currencies produces local and international communities with diverse governance structures.

The choice between these three is conceptually sharp, not rhetorical. Valley is state-centralist, Agora is collectivist-deliberative, Republic is pluralist-polycentric. For the Dutch political-economic debate these are three hinges covering the whole spectrum, from neo-Keynesian public financial infrastructure to Hayekian monetary freedom. For De Machinerie van de Volkshuisvesting a comparable scenario series in print is so far lacking. The prescriptive half is there made explicit in the animation and in Bollen’s publications at Follow the Money. A future elaboration in three housing scenarios — built once again around the axes of public infrastructure, cooperative commons and pluralist self-organisation — would complete the symmetry.

7. The present moment

Kingma’s institutional canonisation in 2025 and 2026 takes place at a political-cultural crossroads the work cannot avoid. Three anchor points of that moment are relevant.

First, New New Babylon at Kunstmuseum Den Haag (29 March through 31 August 2025), curated by Yasmijn Jarram and Zippora Elders. The exhibition positions Constant Nieuwenhuys’ New Babylon (1956–1974) as the central work and places around it work by 28 contemporary artists, each answering the question “Where are we and where do we want to go?” Kingma is one of the 28, alongside Afra Eisma, Hella Jongerius, Jonas Staal, Oscar Murillo, Tai Shani, Moshekwa Langa and The Otolith Group, among others.¹⁵ The exhibition was explicitly positioned by director Margriet Schavemaker — newly at the helm since June 2024 — as an intervention in a political conjuncture in which, in June 2025, the NATO summit in The Hague took place a hundred metres from the museum. The exhibition, according to Schavemaker, suggests that national and international leaders should look to the work of contemporary artists for inspiration and long-term vision. Kingma’s inclusion in this line-up is an institutional confirmation of her position as one of the artists co-shaping Dutch political-cultural discourse. She is recognised by the museum as a canon artist in an exhibition explicitly formulated as a statecraft intervention.

Second, Mesman’s essay The triangle of art, science and society as a way to a just future, included in the exhibition material of New New Babylon. Mesman argues that art and science should be natural allies in the search for a just society, that the triangle between the two and society is “far from self-evident”, and that both the stereotypes around the two professions (scientist in white coat, artist in messy studio) and the institutional funding silos keep that separation in place. She quotes James Baldwin (“the time is always now”) and Toni Morrison (“the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence”). She describes how, in a world where more than a third of the population lives under an authoritarian regime and another fifteen per cent in democracies with authoritarian traits, art and science are typically the first victims of populist leaders. For Kingma’s position this essay is of direct importance. Her practice is precisely the triangle Mesman describes. She produces work that is acquired by museums, published by peer-reviewed journals, and put to work in policy meetings and public debates. The work is a living example of what Mesman formulates as the necessary synthesis.

Third, the specific political conjuncture in which the housing crisis has stood at the centre of Dutch party-political debate since 2025. De Machinerie appears at a moment when parties on the right and the left — sometimes in unexpected alliances — are questioning the system, while the Ministry of Housing and Spatial Planning, since its re-establishment under Hugo de Jonge and under his successors, searches programmatically for institutional reorientation. Kingma’s work arrives in this conjuncture as an image around which administrators, politicians and citizens can order the debate. The travelling pavilion past Atrium The Hague, the Provincial House of Zuid-Holland, the Ministry of Housing and the PROVADA fair is not an art programme but a political-iconographic tour.

8. Method and register

Kingma’s method — described in detail in her Mister Motley interviews and in the practice text De Wolf reflects on in her Een nieuw Babylon essay — consists of a fixed sequence. Choice of subject, recruitment of a partner (typically a journalist or scientist), a literature study of several years, one to two hundred expert interviews, validation of sketches with the interviewees, and finally the drawing itself, with Rotring pen (sizes 0.13 and 0.18) and India ink on museum board, without preliminary drawing. The drawing takes eight to twelve months for one large map. From it are derived the museum edition (edition of 100), the A1 poster (via Follow the Money), the animation of 20 to 25 minutes, the text publication and the travelling pavilion.

The register is black-and-white, hyper-detailed, anti-fashionable. Smets calls this choice, in her NRC review (28 January 2026), unfashionable, as if to indicate that this nightmare stretches through time. The stylistic ancestors are the sixteenth-century Flemish engraving tradition (Brueghel, Bosch, Amman), the neoclassical architectural fantasies (Piranesi’s Carceri, Boullée, Ledoux) and the English architectural drawing tradition (Joseph Gandy’s Bank of England watercolour). What stands out about these choices is that they all reach back to traditions in which architecture was used as the language of the collective — for the collective understanding of public space, public power and public institution.

The political character of these choices becomes visible when the work is compared with practices that are nominally similar but operate in other registers. Forensic Architecture, Eyal Weizman’s collective at Goldsmiths, likewise works collectively and on the basis of extensive source research, but in a forensic-legal register addressed to courts and tribunals. Bureau d’Etudes produces comparable cartographies of power, but in a network-graphic, schematic style closer to activist posters. Mark Lombardi drew financial networks by hand, on a smaller scale and in a more abstract register closer to Saul Steinberg. Metahaven works visual-essayistically in a digital-iconographic mode. Kingma’s choice for the architectural total image in black and white, in a hand-drawn monomania that takes months, is not artistic neutrality but political positioning. She refuses the speed of the network diagram, she refuses Metahaven’s digital-iconic compression, she refuses Forensic Architecture’s legal polemic. What she makes is a treatise-in-images, a political-iconographic monograph, which by its scale and its craft temporarily slows the tempo of political debate and compels contemplation.

9. Tensions and critique

The work raises three tensions that cannot be smoothed away and that the visitor, the critic and whoever acquires the work must answer for themselves.

The first tension is that of co-production with the institutions analysed. Waterworks was made during an artist residency at Rabobank, a commercial bank that figures in the main map as one of the institutions keeping the system in place. De Machinerie was co-financed by Triodos, BNG Bank and the Ministry of Housing, all three parties operating in the domain analysed. That this is not treated as problematic in the Dutch press is itself a political fact deserving attention. It is an institutional constellation with its counterpart in policy academia — think of the government’s advisory councils and planning bureaus (WRR, SCP, CPB), where scholars likewise work on research financed by the government they analyse. The norm in such cases is public methodological transparency and editorial independence. In Kingma’s case the transparency is present (the financing is named in the Finance and Space article as a footnote), but the question of whether the critique does not somewhere lose its edge when the financed critic simultaneously exhibits her work at the financing institution remains standing. For whoever values the work substantively this is not a breaking point, but it is a tension that makes the work more honest when named than when ignored.

The second tension is that between art and didactics. The work leans heavily on accompanying audio tours, animations and texts. The artwork itself asks for explanation, and to that extent it works in a didactic register that canonical art criticism (Metropolis M is strikingly silent; Hans den Hartog Jager has written no review) does not recognise as autonomous visual art. This is not a shortcoming but a methodological choice. Kingma chooses, in line with Neurath, legibility over hermeticism. The price is that the work functions in a hybrid zone between art, journalism, policy analysis and activism. For those who want only autonomous visual art, that is a complication. For those who recognise statecraft iconography as a legitimate genre, it is precisely the core of what the work does.

The third tension is that of scale and effect. The work seeks to promote systemic literacy. Its actual reach — measured in visitor numbers, animation downloads, use in curricula and showings at policy meetings — is considerable for a work of this type, yet small relative to the structural schooling in financial literacy that would actually reform the system. The authors acknowledge this in the Finance and Space article and argue for a fundamental restructuring of the economics curriculum at all levels of education. Kingma’s work is a catalyst in that, not a replacement. It is a symptom of what should happen, not the event itself. For whoever acquires the work this means that owning it is more than an aesthetic choice. It is an entry into an institutional programme in which the work must be activated — in dialogue sessions, in lectures, in administrative encounters — to become effective.

10. Conclusion

Kingma’s The Waterworks of Money and De Machinerie van de Volkshuisvesting together form the core corpus of a contemporary Dutch statecraft practice in images. They stand in a long tradition running from Lorenzetti’s Buon Governo via Neurath’s ISOTYPE and the American-Italian architectural-utopian track of Wright and Soleri to Constant’s New Babylon, and within that tradition they synthesise four separate functions. Lorenzetti’s normative framework: that institutions must be visible and discussable for those who live under them and those who govern them. Neurath’s didactic ambition: that collective literacy in societal systems is a democratic precondition, not a luxury. The iconographic-architectural register of Wright and Soleri: that a credible institutional proposition must be drawn in its full spatial and infrastructural consequence. Constant’s imaginative power: that alternative architectures must be made thinkable before they become politically possible.

The work is thereby statecraft in two connected senses. It is institutional design in images, covering — through its diagnosis of what is and its three scenarios of what could be — the terrain worked in other disciplines by March, Olsen, Pierson, Skowronek and Ostrom. It is at the same time counter-cartography, reversing the Scottian legibility of the state into legibility of the state by its citizens. In both registers it works deliberatively, not polemically, and in that it distinguishes itself from the more activist practices of Forensic Architecture, Bureau d’Etudes or Mark Lombardi.

For the Dutch political-administrative debate of the coming five years, Kingma’s work is not a marginal phenomenon but a central element. In a period in which the housing crisis, the monetary architecture of the eurozone, the digital euro debate and the path dependency of the social domain system all stand on the political agenda simultaneously, a shared visual language for systemic analysis is not an embellishment of the debate but a condition for its possibility. For whoever brings the work into their house, owning it is an obligation to make that function real. Kingma’s maps should not hang on the wall as aesthetic objects but serve as conversation openers, as analytical instruments, as frames of reference for the administrative and political work the owner performs.

In the words of Constant, on his gravestone, taken from his acceptance speech for the Resistance Prize 1991: “In art, freedom manifests itself in its highest form: the creative imagination. Art creates an image of the world that did not exist before — no, more than that, an image that was previously unthinkable.”¹⁶ What Constant hoped of the free imagination, Kingma executes with cartographic precision. She creates images of Dutch institutional reality that for most citizens were genuinely unthinkable — not because they did not exist, but because nobody had put them into an image. That is her contribution to Dutch statecraft.