Early January 2025, we are in Nieuw en Meer and run ahead of a storm. The heavy looming vaporized lump of water fights against the fleeting afternoon light. It was here, where, in 1930, Jan Sluijters painted “New Lake at Evening”. In his painting people gather and enjoy themselves. Nothing of that today because of the bad weather forecast.
Today is more like:
“Amsterdamned, Amsterdamned
Ooh, ooh
This place is damned”
(Lois Lane, 1988)
Across the lake, the opening scene of that famous canal chase was shot. A blockbuster movie full of slasher movie elements. A past wrongful action causes severe trauma reinforced by a commemoration that re-inspires the killer. Built around stalk-and-murder sequences, the film draws upon the audience’s feelings of catharsis, recreation, and displacement, all related to sexual pleasure.
As, anthropologists of this moment, we have a duty to recreate “dirty” perspectives. Glossy trash, like Terrence Koh’s “Gold Plated Poop” (2007). The erasure of its materiality obscures but does not eliminate instead it creates complexity, secrecy, and paradox (this is why we use the aesthetics of censorship).
During an online conversation, about a decade ago, Maria Nordman expressed to have never been asked to present her book about the work “Tjoba, a boat” in Amsterdam. We believe Art can set the record straight considered missed experiences and want to use this occasion to channel “Tjoba, a boat/ Works in the City” back into the public realm of Amsterdam. We have drawn a line between our residency and the location where Maria Nordman docked “Tjoba, a boat” in 1982. We divided this line into forty points which we have started to map using the zwischenlandschaften legend.
At one of the forty points on this line, we discover the censored mural “Nude Rose” (2004) by Dutch artist Rombout Oomen based on an unpublished erotic poem by Jacob van Lennep (1802-1868). Because residents, out of protest, attacked the mural with paint bombs, the pussy of the female nude was censored with “pubic” blocks. This did not stop the controversy though, and in the meantime religious groups have wanted it gone, and most recently feminists used it as an example to advocate publice space is dominated by men. We in turn have taken up the task to recreate the dirty perspective.
What do you think when you see this pussy?
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