20/10/2026
✈️ Eleven people, four days, two countries, and one very carefully colour-coded spreadsheet.
Last week the Motor team went on a study trip through the Netherlands and Belgium. It was the biggest one we’ve done — eleven of us travelling together, which turns out to be exactly one more than most museum group booking forms are expecting.
We went to look at how other people build exhibitions. Over four days we worked our way from Amsterdam down through Hilversum, Arnhem, Utrecht and Rotterdam to Antwerp and Brussels, and spent our days doing what exhibition people do inside other people’s exhibitions: standing very close to a wall, photographing how the panel is fixed to it.
A few numbers from the trip:
➡️ 11 colleagues, 0 lost
➡️ 4 days, 2 countries, 7 cities
➡️ 12 museums
➡️ 20,000 steps per person per day — around 880,000 between us
➡️ 1 itinerary built entirely around the fact that most Dutch museums are closed on Mondays
If we had to pick three — and we did, at length, on the way back — they were the Artis Aquarium in Amsterdam, the Media Museum in Hilversum, and Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. Three very different answers to the same question.
Our thanks to everyone who gave us their time, answered our questions about floor loads, lighting tracks and vitrine seals without once sighing, and took it in good humour when we photographed the cable management instead of the objects. Particular thanks to Alexander Zwennes of Kiss the Frog, who walked us through the Media Museum building and its exhibition, and to Merel Somhorst of Planemos, who opened up their production floor and talked us through their projects.
