Neither of us is powerless

Single-channel 4K video, lexicon print, CNC-milled lines to guide, guard, hold

Filmed during a year of weekly commuting between Amsterdam and London, Neither of Us Is Powerless turns day into night. The airport shrouded in darkness, and populated by ghostly figures muted in delay. Served with a lexicon of words and terms gleaned from airport boutique advertising and smart border technologies that include retinal scanning machines as well as massage chairs.

Design by Woman’s Laptop — Studio Johanna Ehde.

The work installed at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

An improvisation requires, whenever it may occur, whatever you may see, neither becoming stable nor proclaiming that it is new

HD-video with sound, ceramic supplements

On earth, earthenware, and earthquakes. An electric wiring of atmospheric conditions: earthquake emergency exercises; body weather manipulations; tunnel kilns (anagama) and climbing kilns (noborigama). Approaching the body as an assemblage that is, moreover, part of other assemblages.

All-heal Fennel

HD video, blue fabric

“You say to the boy open your eyes
When he opens his eyes and sees the light
You make him cry out, saying:
O Blue come forth
O Blue arise
O Blue ascend
O Blue come in”

Road trip to Prospect Cottage, the house, and garden of filmmaker Derek Jarman (1942 – 1994). Located in the moonlike desert landscape of Dungeness right next to the Dungeness Nuclear Power Station. All-heal Fennel shows a politically layered landscape of reinforced border checks, Guardian reader tourism and traces of Blue (1993) – Jarman’s haunting reflection on HIV

Featuring Jonny Bruce.

Headland

Inkjet print, a3 folded to a4, edition: 100

An artist, an astrologer and a gardener talk about gardens and gardening. Although the three share similar worldviews, they come to find that to truly understand each other, they will have to leave a world of rationality and intellect behind, to enter a reality of intuition and feeling.

headland 2

Final specification: First arrow

Single-channel HD video with sound and object

He wrote in a blog entry that he went to Fukushima Prefecture last October and again in March to gather soil.

He indicated to take a solitary stand against moves to restart idled nuclear reactors. “I am a lone wolf,” one entry reads. “I will not hesitate to commit a terrorist act to stop restart”, says another.

On-the-ground travelogue through the traditional and modern landscapes of Japan. A layering of polar opposites—rural and urban, old and new, natural and artificial—for which modern Japan is famous. Interwoven with news fragments and blog entries on the 2015 Tokyo Drone Incident: when a radioactive drone was found on the Japanese PM’s roof.

Drawing near by calling names

Single-channel HD video with sound

“My friend Sotades, […] representative of the obscene and inventor of the palindrome.”

One of the largest cases of its kind in the history of Dutch law. Protesters and a convicted sex offender. Different protagonists and an unlikely symmetry in their attempts to speak neither aggressively nor defensively, but as equals with the world.

In collaboration with Charlotte Rooijackers.

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OUT OF ORDER

OUT OF ORDER is a sequence of videos made of appropriations and original footage and forms a discourse on the architecture of migration and its overlap with the architecture of detention.

Located in their conjuncture we are a complicity of voices. In different times we travel: let the haunted become the hunter!

In collaboration with Charlotte Rooijackers.

OOO part 2: That this world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel

Professionally distant and emotionally engaged: Elcke Bonsen as a doctor and Elcke Bonsen as a political activist. On the body on hunger strike and about two refused and deported asylum seekers in her care during their 10-week long hunger strikes.

Chapter I Rotterdam The Hagu

Chapter II Conakry

OOO part 1: Personality is found where personal effort is weakest

Arnoud Willems speaks of his experience as a lawyer defending Red Army Faction members in the late 70’s. For their involvement in the kidnapping and killing of industrialist and former SS Untersturmführer Hanns Martin Schleyer.

With an invocation of archival material and including EVP (electronic voice phenomena) recording of Hanns Martin Schleyer made after his death from The German Association For Transcommunication Research (VTF): Otherworldly lingering in the form of image and speech.

Large format photograph, framed

Research material: The murder of Theo van Gogh sparked a violent storm of outrage and grief throughout the Netherlands. Legislation on terrorism was further tightened and justice powers expanded. Online I bought a signed (p. 3) copy of ‘Allah weet het beter’. Printed posthumously, in memoriam (p. 7). :/

Theo 2

My mother’s knowledge of English education came from a childhood reading of Dickens

Single-channel HD video with sound, silkscreen -, and inkjet print

“My sunny Saturdays were usually spent down by the pool, reading or dabbling in woods filled with bluebells and wild garlic. We used to ride the horses out in the woods at night, pretending to be headless huntsmen. […] The philosophy of freedom and self-discipline was both its strength and major weakness. It was the fundamental flaw, which cracked as philosophy became detached from reality.”

Coming-of-age story on the Dartington Hall School. The darling of leftist intellectuals, that offered an egalitarian and co-educational boarding life, yet largely catered for the children of the rich. The school closed its doors in the late ’80s following a series of unwanted high profile disclosures, and a mysterious death of a student.

Featuring acting exercises: a ‘psycho-physical approach’ developed by short-time Dartonian Michael Chekhov. In search of a presumed heritage. Elusive, speculative and dance!

Maybe already a charismatic fop (Cas Enklaar as art collector)

Single-channel HD video with sound

Portrait of a modern dandy. With vanitas symbols. Cas Enklaar—here as art collector—talking about a most recent acquisition while emphasizing his use of both linguistic and nonverbal codes.

Maybe already a characteristic fop (Cas Enklaar as art collector)

Missed Opportunity

Single-channel HD video with sound

Missed Opportunity shows an encounter with the novelist (J.M.A. Biesheuvel) performing one of his writings …*&::**!!

Made during a yearlong project with If I Can’t Dance looking at forms of masking and masquerade, mimicry, parody, and assimilation.

(From the On the millions of gestures that constitute life on earth series.)

Translated transcription hand-out to accompany the video.

Mimeographed a3 folded to a4, edition: 350

Kitchen in Dordrecht. Also mise-en-scène and remarkable place of appearance by Nabokov, Homerus, Thomas Mann, Jane Austen, Herman Melville, Gogol, Tolstoj, Vergilius, Dante, Flaubert, Cleopatra, Jezus, and Pontius Pilatus. In ‘Gemiste Kans’ (written by Maarten Biesheuvel).

3 large format photographs

The work installed in the bookshop of Wyspa in Gdańsk.

For Potatoes We’ve Got Potatoes

Mimeographed a4 folded to a5, 12 pages, edition: 100

A collection of seven short stories and my contribution to ‘User’s Manual: The Grand Domestic Revolution’: a ‘living research’ project by Casco in Utrecht. For Potatoes We’ve Got Potatoes is a gently ironic illustration of things encountered during the year-long project. Taken, translated, cut and rearranged from ‘Een lief, verlegen vrouwtje’ by Dutch writer Maarten Biesheuvel and highlighting an underlying themes of labour vs. non-appreciated domestic-labour or housework; work that isn’t, unless you can pay someone to do it for you.

A well-dressed gentleman walks the street, when a thrush shits on his narrow-lapelled suit. He gets out his handkerchief, wipes off the refuse, looks up and mutters; ‘For some they sing…’

Offset lithography, 81 pages, edition: 250

A book about bookmaking, about writing and telling stories, and about how these come to be. (Also) about translation; featuring a translation of a story by Maarten Biesheuvel, now titled: Journey Through My Room. In translation, literalness is often sacrificed for the sake of preserving melody and rhyme. But in fact, any translation that does not sound like a translation is bound to be inexact. I tried to preserve the voice of the original.

However, this translation is not anywhere close to a literal translation, as it is incomplete, as some words are missing; made visible as blank pages, or as blank parts of pages (depending on the amounts of words missing). What is translated forms an interpretation, a gaze or mode of looking, highlighting a highly romantic and maybe old-fashioned notion of a writer who, in solitary confinement of his studio, finds inspiration in the more humble and ordinary things of life.

Further, the publication features a text by German art and music critic, writer, curator and amateur DJ, Hans-Jürgen Hafner, which is titled Pile and Column and explores the notion of literacy, and the role of collecting on intellectual development.

Gray Magazine 5: The Archive – Speaking of Images (out loud)

Offset print, edition: 1500

After being asked to bring order and structure to a vast collection of 20000 slides catching dust on the shelves of Andre Klein’s (then head of the applied arts department at the Sandberg institute) home, Rana Ghavami and I were inspired to do a bit more; to take the collection off the shelves and beyond the grey walls of the classroom.

The slides were digitally scanned and structured as originally on the shelves. We invited people from different fields to have a look, for new interpretations and to lecture these at a one-day event. After transcribing, the lectures have been edited into a printed report of the day, forming one part of the magazine. The other part consists of a conversation with Andre Klein and a glimpse into his archive through the form of a poster. A further conversation with a specialist in photographic reproduction discusses the aging process of the slide and how current technology renders the analogue archive obsolete.