During the COVID-19 pandemic, cultural exchanges between China and the Netherlands cannot take place in real life. That is why, on Friday 18 December 2020, the Netherlands Cultural Institute Online (NCIO) will kick off at Tencent Art Channel, one of China's most popular video streaming sites. During the coming four months, NCIO will present more than seventy exclusive art programmes from the Netherlands.

Chinese audiences interested in art and culture will have the opportunity to enjoy top-notch art programmes from the Netherlands, regardless of physical constraints and time differences. NCIO will guide Chinese art lovers along all that Dutch culture has to offer, ranging from architecture, photography, and design to performing arts as music and dance and to multi-disciplinary art forms.

Dutch artists, designers and art institutions strive to break new barriers by providing arts and culture online this year. NCIO, the largest online Dutch art programme open to Chinese audiences, reconnects people with digital art content.

The NCIO is an initiative from the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in China. You can click here to access the NCIO @ Tencent Art (in Chinese), or scan the QR codes in the poster below. 

The Netherlands Cultural Institute Online has invited some of the best Dutch art institutes, including the Rijksmuseum, the Van Gogh Museum, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Netherlands’ National Ballet, the Dutch National Opera, and the North Sea Jazz Festival for a spectacular digital showcase.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been hard for everyone, especially for art institutions and artists. Being innovative, art institutes from the Netherlands have found new ways in this special time to provide arts to their audiences. For example, artists from the Dutch National Ballet performed on streets, on riversides, and in gardens; the performances address people’s loneliness, and comforted citizens who were quarantined at home. The Cello Octet Amsterdam made a series of short music videos themed Alone Together. The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Sinfonia Rotterdam, and the Netherlands Wind Ensemble all selected and edited their best, past performance videos for the NCIO audience.

Like many museums around the world during the pandemic, Dutch museums went through a digital transformation. The Rijksmuseum released a programme called Rijksmuseum Unlocked. Senior curators elaborating on the museum’s collections, hosted this widely popular programme. The Van Gogh Museum released a virtual tour series, allowing people to enjoy the museum from home. Photographers used the state-of-art technology vividly representing the Van Gogh Museum from a visitor’s view. At the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the director and their curators cherry-picked among the museum’s most spectacular artworks and showed historical and cultural information in just one minute for their audience.

NCIO will release the documentary film Inner Landscape by the director Frank Scheffer, about Chinese modern music composer Guo Wenjing and Sichuan opera. Taking a Westerner’s point of view, Scheffer took seven years and filmed the process of Guo Wenjing and Sichuan opera singer Shen Tiemei recreating the famous Sichuan opera Si Fan. The film was screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, and it received rave reviews. As a subsequent result, the famous percussion group Slagwerk Den Haag invited Guo Wenjing to compose a music piece: Parade (Xuan).

Another example is the collaboration between the orchestra Holland Baroque and the sheng player Wu Wei presenting another innovative programme at the NCIO. They brought several well-known Western and Eastern musical pieces together, presenting a brand-new art experience for Chinese audiences.

These collaborations showcase a strong connection between artists from the Netherlands and China: both reviving the past and creating for a brighter future. By presenting content focused on cultural exchange, NCIO will provide a platform for further exchange between China and the Netherlands both on and offline. In so doing, stimulating more dialogue and collaboration between the two unique cultures.

From now on, independent professionals, organisations and consortia operating in the creative industry and wishing to position their practice internationally can consult the International Support Index portal to find out what support grants or schemes are available for them. Het Nieuwe Instituut and the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy have jointly developed this online tool, providing a comprehensive overview of all the financial and non-financial resources to support the internationalisation of the creative industry.

For professionals working in the sectors of architecture, design, digital culture, gaming, film and fashion, there are all kinds of opportunities to develop and grow their practice abroad. The national government is increasingly offering support schemes, managed by for instance the Creative Industries Fund NL, SEE NL, Het Nieuwe Instituut, the Netherlands Enterprise Agency, the Fund for Cultural Participation, the Netherlands Film Fund and DutchCulture.

The International Support Index has been developed to make it easier to find these schemes. Through a step by step process, the online tool helps the users find the schemes that are available for them. This includes financial and non-financial forms of support, ranging from project grants and (travel) vouchers to artist-in-residence options, matchmaking or advisory talks with (local) experts.

The portal primarily aims to inform individual makers, companies and consortia in the sectors of design, architecture, digital culture, gaming, fashion and film. Additionally, the portal aims to inform funds and policymakers about existing schemes for creative makers and to identify possible gaps in what’s offered.

Every autumn some major Dutch international cultural happenings and festivals take place. This year’s events have been a great challenge due to coronavirus. What has been the impact on their international cooperation and participation? How did they reinvent themselves digitally? A review of how Cinekid, IDFA, ADE and Dutch Design Week shifted internationally from offline to online. 

Like an intergalactic explorer floating through space. That’s what diving into Cinekid Play for the first time feels like. After logging onto the virtual platform, two clunky robot arms appear on your screen, floating in space. Straight ahead is what looks to be your destination: the planet Technos. But a closer look at the infinite in front of you reveals a whole range of different planets.  

Each of the virtual planets in Cinekid Play has its distinct theme, ranging from technology (the aforementioned planet Technos), history (the planet Tijdcapsule) and adulthood (Acneet). Clicking on a planet reveals a range of content associated with the theme. From short films, animations and workshops to small games and feature films. To access the content, which thanks to geographic blocking is only available in the Netherlands, a visitor must subscribe for 4,99 euro’s a month.  

”We wanted to recreate the feeling visitors get when they attend our festival,” says Heleen Rouw, general director of Cinekid Festival, the largest international film, television and new media festival for children aged 4 to 14. ”In normal years visitors arrive at the festival and immediately immerse themselves. They can visit a movie, attend masterclasses and workshops or discover interactive art in our MediaLab. We wanted to recreate that feeling digitally, with the help of gamification. Hosting a digital film festival is so much more than providing a link to a video stream.” 

Cinekid Festival is one of the many festivals in the Netherlands that had to find ways to reinvent itself in 2020. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, most festivals and cultural gatherings from April through July had to be cancelled. Although the number of infections dropped steadily during the summer and restrictions banning large cultural events were scaled back, the risk of the coronavirus flaring up again was always a possibility. Event organisers planning their cultural festival for later in the year took note and started thinking about digital alternatives.  

“At the end of May, we decided to go a different route with the Cinekid Festival. We felt hosting a regular edition was unwise because of the virus,” Rouw notes. Normally the entire festival takes place at one location at a former gasworks in Amsterdam, while numerous theatres throughout the Netherlands show screenings of children’s movies. “We still wanted to do part of the festival at physical locations, because we wanted to bring the festival to our audience. Therefore we decided to spread the physical activities over ten different locations.” 

The 2020 edition, which took place between October 7th and 23rd, coined the tagline ‘Online en in de buurt’ (Online and nearby). The programme aimed at professionals such as directors, producers, broadcasters and artists took place online in its entirety. The annual industry forum was streamed live and digital attendees and guests could join in and ask questions via the virtual meeting platform Wereby. Pitches for the Junior Co-production Market, a marketplace where young filmmakers can present their work, were filmed and meet ups were made accessible to all accredited guests.  

Unlike Cinekid Play, the professional part of the festival was also available to international guests. Although it is too early to tell what impact the digital festival had on an international scale – Cinekid still has to do an evaluation of its festival – the professional part drew more visitors than last year’s regular event. “In 2019 600 professionals attended”, says Rouw. “This year there were 676, of which 383 were from a total of 51 different countries.” 

To digitise its events, Cinekid Festival, alongside three other movie festivals in the Netherlands, commissioned IT-company Medialoc, a collaboration of Indyvideo and Marteco, to build a content management system that could recreate the festival experience. “When you visit a screening at a festival, the experience is a lot broader than just watching a movie,” says Cees van ‘t Hullenaar, festival director at International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam (IDFA). “Often you get an introduction by the direction as the movie starts and also a chance to ask questions afterwards. The new backend helps us to bring all of these aspects together.” 

Festivals using the backend created by Medialoc start with creating a container: an empty vessel in which they can add content, like digital meetings planned with meeting apps like Whereby or videos uploaded to Vimeo. The container makes sure all of the different parts of the screening follow each other seamlessly. “Viewers joining us online don’t have to click on anything to go from one part of the screening to the next,” Van ‘t Hullenaar clarifies. “You can assign any service you like to a container.” 

One service that IDFA assigns to their container is ActiveTickets, an online platform located in the Netherlands which focuses itself on event ticketing. Although the internet allows us to have almost an infinite number of attendees at a screening, getting as many viewers as possible is not the goal of IDFA. “A film festival is a place where the life of a movie starts,” says Van ‘t Hullenaar. “Filmmakers can present their work to distributors and tv networks, who in turn can choose to buy the rights to the movies and bring it to the general public.” By using ActiveTickets, IDFA can choose the maximum number of tickets available for digital screening. “Once they’re gone, they’re gone.” 

During IDFA, which takes place from November 16th to December 6th, each movie is shown two or three times. On average, a total of 1000 individuals will be able to watch, spread out over those different screenings. After the premiere, which takes place in a real theatre with up to thirty viewers, screenings will be available online at set times during the festival. The screenings, which also include Q&A sessions and talks with directors, are divided into a timetable. Just like during an actual festival. 

“We wanted to keep that festival feeling,” Van ‘t Hullenaar says. “By having a finite number of seats available, you create a sense of urgency for the visitor. A festival exists by the grace of scarcity. Our visitors know they are never able to see every movie, so they have to pick wisely. That is all part of the festival experience, which we desperately wanted to keep.” 

The same goes for Amsterdam Dance Event (ADE), the biggest club festival in the world, which usually attracts around 400.000 visitors from over the planet. The festival normally consists of 800 events spread around 400 locations in the Dutch capital. But this year’s edition that took place from October 21 through 25, celebrating ADE’s 25th anniversary, would end up being a mostly digital experience. “We decided we only wanted to bring ADE online if we found a way to convey the same ADE feeling,” festival directors Jan Willem van de Ven and Meindert Kennis told newspaper NRC. “That’s the feeling that for five days straight, you’re submerged in all things electronic music. You’re always missing out on more events than you visit.” 

Unlike festivals that were taking place in the summer, ADE had quite some time to prepare itself to create an online version. The development of a new digital platform already started in March, shortly after the coronavirus first hit the Netherlands. During the digital festival, which was dubbed ADE Online, visitors got presented a timetable and could freely choose between pre-recorded DJ-sets, interviews, movie screenings, live concerts and live panel discussions. Over 200 digital events in total. Van de Ven and Kennis: “If you organise something like this, you have to make sure your content is solid.” 

Up until one week before the start of ADE, Van de Ven and Kennis were still planning on organising 25 live events to coincide with the online portion of the festival. But after the Dutch government announced the closing of clubs, cafés and restaurants to battle the growing number of COVID-19 infections, ADE dropped most physical activities, except a handful of movie screenings, an art show and one live concert.  

ADE wasn’t the only big Dutch festival that had to change plans just weeks before kick-off. Dutch Design Week (DDW), the biggest design event in Northern Europe, had its permit withdrawn two weeks before the start. “During the summer it looked like corona would be gone by October,” says DDW’s head of programming Jorn Konijn. “Luckily, we had already started working on a virtual festival when we got the bad news.” 

Konijn continues and explains that the virtual part of DDW focussed on three branches. “We built a big television studio to stream talks and lectures in,” he says. “Some of our expositions were already built, so we decided to film them using 360-degree cameras. We also built 3D Viewing Rooms, in which designers could show off their products with the help of images and video presentations. We tried to recreate the feeling of walking into an actual room like you would during a physical festival.” 

Although some of the 3D Viewing Rooms worked quite well, Konijn realises there might have been too many of them. In total visitors could browse over 500 rooms. “After about ten of them, a lot of people decided they’d seen enough. It’s much harder to keep someone’s focus for an extended period when you’re online. The whole virtual festival was a learning experience.” 

In future instalments, the 3D Viewing Rooms most likely won’t return. But the online talk shows probably will, Konijn says. Some of the talk shows at DDW have been viewed over 3000 times, where normally only 250 visitors at a time could attend an offline lecture. Aside from some of these basis live stream figures, numbers from all festivals mentioned are scarce due to the fact evaluations are just starting at the time of writing. However, Konijn feels the online edition of DDW reached far more international guests than usual, most of which came from the United States and the United Kingdom. “Measuring the international impact is difficult, but I feel the high number of viewers contributes to the general image of Dutch Design and the Netherlands’ position as a creative and innovative country.” 

Comparing the number of virtual visitors with attendees at a physical festival can also be tricky, Heleen Rouw from Cinekid warns. “At a physical festival visitors tend to buy a ticket and wander to different expositions. Do you count each of those as a single visit or not?” IDFA’s Cees van ‘t Hullenaar is a bit sceptical. “Often you hear that being online increases your reach, but I don’t think that is necessarily the case. Last year we had over 300.000 visitors. I don’t think we will manage to reach that many people online this year. Our public event is only available in the Netherlands and is blocked in other countries, which leads to fewer visitors. The professional part of the festival, consisting of a ‘documentary for sale’-market, a co-finance market and our talent programme, is open to international guests. About 2000 of them have registered. Last year we had 3400 professional attendees.” 

Not everything can go off without a hitch at a first try. “Creating a digital festival for the first time comes with a lot of trial and error,” Konijn says. “Experimentation is also a key task of a festival, especially in times when you’re thrown a curveball. We had to adapt quickly this year. We were already planning on making Dutch Design Week partly virtual, but the COVID-19 outbreak sped up the process. We now have a basic digital infrastructure on which we can expand the next couple of years.” 

Building that basic infrastructure, and doing it quickly, is the common denominator for all of the big Dutch cultural festivals which were set to take place this autumn. COVID-19 sped up the process of virtualisation. Rouw: “Having a virtual world where kids could experience films and our festival via gamification had been a dream of us for quite a while. But we weren’t planning on having it just yet.” Van ‘t Hullenaar adds: “In one year we did the work we planned to do in four. The pandemic has really accelerated that process.” 

It is still too early to pinpoint the exact impact the digital editions of the mentioned festivals have had. But what is clear, is that the outbreak of COVID 19 forced international cultural festivals in the Netherlands to quickly reinvent themselves. This has led to quicker digitisation, all the while keeping the international character of the gatherings in mind. If the new platforms can be expanded, the future of international cultural festivals can look very bright. 

The photo exhibition, masterfully curated by photographer Johny Pitts and Foam curator Kim Knoppers, officially opened on September 17. A day later, as an official programme part of the Forum on European Culture, the audience enjoyed a fresh look at Pitts’ photos just before finding their seats for a compelling and entertaining evening. It was inspiring and insightful discussion of Johny’s writing and his photography, moderated by de Balie’s programme editor Rokhaya Seck. Along with Johny and the moderator, speakers Francio Guadeloupe, Lisette Ma Neza and guitarist Orville Breeveld all related in their unique ways to the artist’s search for the Afropean identity. You can watch the programme below.

The evening started with an almost instantaneous musical connection. Riffing off the main musical theme of Johny’s short film Afropean Express, Orville Breeveld played as if he had accompanied him for years; it made the delivery of Johny’s slam poem The Afropean Express an immediate success. Warm applause followed from the small audience gathered in the exhibition space at Foam.

After this, multi-talented Pitts (who writes, photographs, makes film and plays music) expanded upon the early beginnings of the project, answering to the questions from moderator Rokhaya Seck. Young slam poetry performer Lisette Ma Neza, seated in the first row, scribbled along furiously and then delivered an inspired spoken word intervention that served simultaneously as punctuation and summary of the discussion, accompanied by Breeveld on guitar. She went on to perform her intimate and harrowing song I can’t breathe written in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. The combination of the words with an upbeat guitar pattern was at times eerie and uncomfortable but beautifully executed. 

The talk that followed between UvA anthropologist Francio Guadeloupe and Pitts focused on the question of the hyphen or the dash, zooming in on the denominative aspect of Johny’s quest and what a label can represent. Why would you spell Afropean as one word, and not use a word like Afro-European? Pitts: “I’d like to come up with a way of viewing the world that was whole and unhyphenated. I didn’t want to be half this half that, and Afropean could be a portal to it. I wanted to bed blackness into Europe. It’s a sort of a futuristic word that helps to piece the jigsaw together.” Guadeloupe: “the dash between a word like Afro-Caribbean is important. The dash is also a bridge and allows for many alliances.” 

Guadeloupe and Pitts went on to discuss the particular liminal and exciting nature of port cities. Guadeloupe, who was in the process of finishing his work on Rotterdam and its unique cultural composition from an anthropological perspective, connected with Pitts who after finishing his journey had moved with his family to Marseille, the place that felt more like home and more Afropean than any of the other places he visited. 

To close the programme after a round of questions from the audience, Ma Neza commanded guitarist Breeveld to evoke and ‘play’ the feeling of being lost as a child in a supermarket. For somebody aiming to evoke the feelings of a lost young boy, these memories sounded surprisingly happy and cheerful. Contradictions recurred in different ways throughout the evening. Accepting complexity and uncertainty within the hybrid notion of the Afropean remains central a central theme in the work of Pitts, which he describes as a quest, an ongoing discovery of the ‘bricolage of blackness’. In the final stage of the evening, Ma Neza aptly recognised this search. 

“I’m sure you are less sure now. There’s a space between the places. There’s a place where people come together, a meeting place on the world wide web. It’s called Afropea. There’s dialogues and sometimes, similarities and commonalities. Young girl, did you find your mother back yet? In my head, in my head, I think to myself: maybe Marseille will make me feel like I found my mother, and perhaps I’ll be more sure then,” recites Ma Neza.
 

More than merely an exhibition, the collaboration between Foam, Forum and Johny Pitts proved to be a meeting ground for conversation and reflection. As a companion piece to the programme and the photos, Foam and Forum realised an in-depth conversation between the artist and the renowned emeritus professor Gloria Wekker of Utrecht University and author of White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race. Surrounded by Pitts’ photos, the two had an engaging conversation on how Pitts’ work subverts dominant photographic modes of portraying black people, how the work situates black Europeans not only within postcolonial failures of the past but also concerning the failure of the promised future of multiculturalism, among a variety of topics. Wekker and Pitts also speculate on the future of Afropean as a project, as Wekker suggests documenting the lives of black Europeans in rural contexts too. Johny concurs, and similar to the way he describes the design of his exhibition - an indefinite, and perhaps incoherent bricolage of blackness - he states without any regret: “It’s a journey that doesn’t’ necessarily conclude, I think,” to which Gloria replies: “It has to go on.” 

Even though the exhibition at Foam has now come to an end, a selection of his photos can still be seen outdoors, on the Mercatorplein in Amsterdam-West. There, a unique edition of Foam’s Galerie Mercatorplein is on view until December 10.

Every year, Foam sets up a collaboration with the city and Stadsdeel West to produce a spin-off project in public space, called Gallerie Mercatorplein. Foam has been collaborating with the (Nieuw-)West district for years and shows exhibitions in the public space on Mercatorplein. By setting up the outdoor photo gallery, Foam contributes to the goal of the Amsterdam-West district to make Mercatorplein a living room for De Baarsjes. For this edition of Galerie Mercatorplein, specifically, Foam worked together with the Nieuw Amsterdam Academy. Youngsters from New West made a selection from the work of Johny Pitts. Through the QR codes that accompany the large photos, you can listen to the reasons behind their curatorial choices.

A selection of Pitts' photos appeared in the book Afropean: Notes From Black Europe published by Penguin in 2019 for which Pitts was recently awarded the Jhalak Prize. Pitts is also the founder of online platform Afropean.com.