Journeys Across Archives features a series of artist presentations and performative readings, each recollecting subversive processes towards archiving, mapping, and re-envisioning existing ‘environments’ — as much in the literal as metaphorical sense.
+ Screening of Trees of Rotterdam (2022) by Alice Ladenburg and Ollie Palmer, launch of a special edition print
+ Book presentation of A Dutch Landscape (Rollo Press, 2022) by José Quintanar
+ Instructions to get lost: A triangular reading by To See the Inability to See
+ Storysharing by Ratu R Saraswati
More information:
Still from Trees of Rotterdam by Alice Ladenburg and Ollie Palmer
Trees of Rotterdam is a journey through the skies, streets and trees of Rotterdam, merging high-tech point-cloud scans with individual perspectives on what those trees mean to the city and its people. The film draws on Alice Ladenburg‘s publication Fourteen Trees of Rotterdam – a guide for city exploration, published by PrintRoom and Peter Foolen Editions and presented last year. The guide focuses on 14 trees, including geographical, botanical and historical information, archival photographs, observational writing, ink drawings, scientific data and images created using laser scans. Through these multiple representations, the user is encouraged to consider the role that trees have within our cityscape, and how their own perspective can change the way they can experience and understand their environment.A special limited edition Fourteen Trees of Rotterdam Riso print will be launched on the occasion of the new film.
Pre-print / Pages of the Book: A Dutch Landscape by José Quintanar
José Quintanar’s A Dutch Landscape (Rollo Press, 2022) encompasses a five-year-long visual research. Quintanar attentively studied various landscapes throughout the Netherlands and translated them into rhythmic, deconstructed linear forms. Simultaneously, he mapped out the complex historical narratives embedded in these terrains through texts and photographs. The book itself is both a landscape — a gathered pile of material, a small mountain in an otherwise flat landscape — and an archive.
In the framework of the final event of Between Four Walls — a series of nomadic presentations, initiated by Notes on Hapticity Collective in collaboration with PrintRoom — artist Ratu R. Saraswati and the artistic research collective To See the Inability to See (Arefeh Riahi, Maartje Fliervoet and Martín La Roche Contreras) will present performative readings. These readings arise from their respective contributions to 16 10 20, a riso-printed anthology of performance scores, published by PrintRoom earlier this year.
Through an essayistic and performative process, To See the Inability to See weaves stories, thoughts and visual material together with books and objects from various archives. In a pragmatic way the collective tries to temporarily bring those together to allow them to narrate a new story. Some of the topics that its research is concerned with are exclusion, alienation and belonging.
Ratu R Saraswati: Route of Flowers
Artist Ratu R Saraswati (Saras) creates stories that emerge from everyday encounters that she believes are not coincidental. A mother of a dead meerkoet, a captivated Java kancil: she wishes to tell the stories of the beings of the city of Amsterdam, a city far away from her home in Java island.