dd. 15/04/2026 by Anna Musikhina
I had entered the system looking for an object and a price. Instead, I left with something harder to account for: a story about translation, harm, and a form of generosity that briefly interrupted the logic of exchange.

The solarium had been part of the plan long before this week. For days, I spent my evenings on Marktplaats, searching for the right model, an accessible location, and a reasonable price. A couple of weeks before the start of the Social Disruptions residency, I found a promising option in Groningen.
I wrote to the seller almost immediately, explaining that I was an artist and wanted to buy the solarium for a project. Three days passed without a reply, even though my message had been read almost at once. A friend suggested the likely reason: I had written in English.
That left me with mixed feelings. I was on a platform built entirely around exchange, where everything is supposedly available if the price is right, yet access still seemed to depend on speaking the seller language. It turned out that money was not the only currency in circulation, familiarity was too. Maybe the seller thought I was a scammer. Maybe the idea of an artist buying a solarium sounded suspicious. Or maybe the market, despite its promise of openness, still has its own small gatekeeping rituals.
My Dutch friend then messaged him from his own account, in Dutch, and the reply came immediately. After a few brief exchanges, we were told we could pick it up in a week and a half. But when we tried to confirm the time and address a few days before, the seller disappeared. By then the driver had been arranged, the van was booked, and the whole logistical chain was already in motion. So we started searching again. There were not many options around Groningen, and the pressure was rising.
Then I found another one, about 40 kilometers outside the city. This time, of course, I wrote in Dutch and offered to come the very next morning. The answer was immediate: yes, come, here is the address. I had never been so relieved by the smooth choreography of supply and demand.
The next morning, we carried the solarium down from the attic and loaded it into the van. While we worked, the seller, an older Dutch man, asked whether I wanted to use it for tanning. I joked that of course not, I did not want skin cancer. 
He did not laugh. Instead, he spoke seriously to my friend in Dutch for quite a long time. Then I learned that he and his wife had stopped using the solarium for exactly that reason. And now his wife had lung cancer and did not have much time left. He compared the slow, cumulative harm of smoking to that of solarium, and then asked what I planned to do with such a harmful object. I told him I was an artist, and that the solarium would become part of a performance and he was quite curious to know more about it. 
When we finished loading it, we asked how he wanted to be paid. He said he was giving it to me for free, for the sake of art. The only thing he wanted in return was to see photographs of the performance.