Lijst met uitgaven 1849 - 1895

This list of expenses was created by Willem Koekkoek, though the exact date of its creation remains unknown to us. At first glance, it might seem unremarkable, merely a record of purchases. Yet, even within the seemingly mundane script of daily life, symbols persist. The act of writing itself is profoundly symbolic. The arrangement of letters, encoding language and meaning, echoes our earliest attempts to capture the world through symbols – think of cave paintings translating lived experience. Just as the ancients sought to preserve their stories, Koekkoek’s list immortalizes the fleeting moment of economic exchange. Consider the evolution from cuneiform tablets, impressed with tokens representing goods, to this page filled with ink. The technology shifts, but the impulse remains: to record, to remember, to make material our interactions with the world. Even the numbers listed here – these abstract representations of quantity – connect us to the deep human drive to measure and understand our place within the cosmos. These simple marks are more than just records, they are echoes of our collective past.