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).
All Heal (Fennel)
HD video, blue canvas pillows
Calais security chiefs flood land around the channel tunnel to stop migrants, and due to reinforced border checks delays were to be expected, but with our Dutch passports, we get through quite easily.
Road trip to Prospect Cottage, the house and garden of filmmaker Derek Jarman (1942 – 1994). Located in the moonlike desert landscape of Dungeness, on the shingle shore near the Dungeness Nuclear Power Station.
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.
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 of an act of drone activism: of a radioactive drone found on the Japan PM’s office 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 -, or the largest of its kind in the history of Dutch law. A convicted sex offender as university guest lecturer and protesters dismissed as white trash. Spectacle and spectators, excitement and boredom, and an unlikely symmetry of different protagonists in their attempts to speak neither aggressively nor defensively, but as equals with the world.
With Benno L., protesters, VU university students, staff and security.
In collaboration with Charlotte Rooijackers.
[Clickbait!]
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 3: Nomenclature is for cavemen
Opening its doors in 1974 as one of the most technologically advanced prisons of its time, Overmaze Prison Maastricht closes in 2014 due to austerity measures. The inside here documented in a state of limbo, in transmigration, before becoming a reception center housing 700 refugees.
“scanpath: cadavre exquis”
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 who were in her care during their 10-week long hunger strikes in detainment at detention center Rotterdam The Hague Airport.
Chapter I Rotterdam The Hague
Chapter II Conakry
OOO part 1: Personality is found where personal effort is weakest
High court judge Arnoud Willems speaks of a change in the climate of practicing law professionally and of his experience as a lawyer defending Red Army Faction members 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.
Allah weet het beter (pages 2,3,6,7)
Large format photograph, framed
Research material for Personality is found where personal effort is weakest: 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’, strangely enough, the book is printed posthumously in memoriam (p. 7).
My mother’s knowledge of English education came from a childhood reading of Dickens
Single-channel HD video with sound
Coming-of-age story on the Dartington Hall School, a progressive boarding school in the English countryside also known as ‘the Dartington experiment’. A darling of leftist intellectuals, that offered an egalitarian and co-educational boarding life, yet largely catered for the children of the rich. It closed its doors in the late ’80s following a series of unwanted high profile disclosures, including the mysterious death of a student.
Featuring acting exercises: a ‘psycho-physical approach’ developed by short-time Dartonian Michael Chekhov. All in search of a presumed heritage. Elusive, speculative and dance!
My mother’s knowledge of English education came from a childhood reading of Dickens
Project file, silkscreen and inkjet print
A collection of reflections, observations, and notes on ‘the Dartington experiment’.
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.
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 and 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. The text is taken, translated, cut and rearranged from ‘Een lief, verlegen vrouwtje’ by Dutch writer Maarten Biesheuvel and highlights an underlying theme of labour vs. non-appreciated domestic-labour or housework: the 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.
The very opposite of doing nothing
Table, video, set design
Fritz Hansen B619 Extending Dining Table Replica. The extra table leaf cast in a blue rubber. On a flush mount monitor plays a panning exercise.
For blue, there are no boundaries or solutions. Fathomless blue of bliss.
