HIER.

Wendelien van Oldenborgh
Wendelien van Oldenborgh uses architecture both as a setting and as an investigative tool to question politics and its history. We remember the formidable sophistication constructions of Two Stones (FID 2020) and Beauty and the Right to the Ugly (FID 2015). The deliberately simple title of his latest film unequivocally underlines the importance of space. And once again, he refuses the schematisation and demagogy of shortcuts, here, it is complexity that is required. As this space, the ” here” that is filmed, is instantaneously multifold: the land and the setting in which we find ourselves; the place we come from, which continues to float within and around us (in short, the musicality of a space); the memory of the place, itself intertwined (layers, visible or not, of the archive formed by a site). Seizing the opportunity of the renovation of the Museum of Modern Art in Arnhem, issues related to the Indo-European community in the Netherlands are revisited, forming a three-threaded tress: a group of young musicians, FRED; a poet, Pelumi Adejumo; and an art historian, Lara Nuberg. Although the Museum’s original building is part of a colonial past, its current vocation is to promote women artists and artists from different cultural backgrounds. Here are the young women who have been called upon to bring this Museum to life, before our very eyes: through sound and words, analysis and poetry, actions and images. To engage with the walls of the building and the allegories that it harbours. A collective work, in which the director draws all the subtleties into a magnificently intelligent dance.
(Jean-Pierre Rehm)