"In 2019 wilde ik in een onderzoeksproject doen naar het archetype van Moeder in de voormalige Sovjet-Unie. Ik ben geboren in Wolgograd ten tijde van de Sovjet-Unie,  waar het grootste standbeeld van een vrouw van Europa staat, een bijna agressief beeld van een moeder, genaamd ‘Het Moederland Roept’. Door het Mondriaanfonds kreeg ik al ondersteuning voor een onderzoek naar moeders, moederland, en dit soort beelden die ook in andere steden staan, maar voor reis- en presentatiekosten had ik aanvullende fondsen nodig. Die vroeg ik aan bij i-Portunus, en zo kon ik naar Oekraïne, Georgië, Armenië en Rusland om onderzoek te doen, de archieven in te duiken, video-beelden te maken, mensen te interviewen en kunstenaars en instellingen te ontmoeten. In elk land deed ik een korte residentie en maakte ik een tussenpresentatie. De bedoeling was om een grote tentoonstelling in die landen en in Nederland te presenteren eind 2020, maar vanwege COVID-19 ging dit niet door. 

Deelnemen in i-Portunus is me heel goed bevallen. Ik heb mijn onderzoeksdoelen bereikt, en gebouwd aan mijn netwerk en mijn internationale carrière. Ik wil internationaal werken, en het contact met mijn land van oorsprong is voor mij erg belangrijk. Aan andere kunstenaars en makers die twijfelen of ze zich willen opgeven voor i-Portunus zou ik willen zeggen: gewoon doen!"

The World Press Photo Special Exhibition ‘Our World 2018-2020’ is on view from November 15 to December 13 at Bund 18 Jiushi Art Gallery in Shanghai, China. This exhibition presents winning photos and stories from Nature and Environment categories of the 2018-2020 World Press Photo Contests and is brought to Shanghai with the support of the Consulate-General of the Netherlands in Shanghai, Shanghai International Culture Association, Shanghai Jiushi Art Museum as well as Shanghai Anchor Industrial Co., Ltd.

The exhibition highlights our natural world and human impact on the environment, a special category introduced by the World Press Photo Foundation in Amsterdam since 2018, which is rather pertinent during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The exhibition includes a variety of visual stories, ranging from pandas in China and poaching in South Africa to stories about trash recycling and innovative agriculture to feed the world.

Are you a Dutch or Netherlands-based artist taking part in international cultural collaborations that are available online and would you like to be in the spotlight? Send us an email with detailed information and two horizontal high res images. The editing team will make a selection and get back to you.

Check out the complete overview of Dutch cultural activities in China in our database.

If you are a cultural professional interested in an international collaboration with China, feel free to contact our China advisor Ian Yang.

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.

No Seat At The Table is a fictional graphic novel about the local and global influences of gentrification on citizens in Turkish and Dutch cities. The book highlights four neighbourhoods where this phenomenon is occurring: Piyalepaşa in Istanbul, Ismetpasa in Ankara, De Kolenkitbuurt in Amsterdam, and Lombok in Utrecht. The stories are told from the perspective of a pigeon. With this book, the team would like to start a conversation about the negative impacts of gentrification. The most pressing issues are forced displacement, the stigmatization of the residents in these districts by people in power, and the exclusion of low-income groups from the places where this urban transformation is taking place.

The core team consists of writer/project leader Minem Sezgin, illustrators Jasmijn de Nood (Amsterdam), Rajab Eryiğit (Istanbul), Bob Mollema (Utrecht) and Erhan Muratoğlu (Ankara), and book designer Murat Otunc and Vincent de Boer.

In this interview with Minem Sezgin we go back and forth between January and June 2020. We hear from Minem about her fascinating project No Seat at the Table, how COVID-19 has affected her plans and what type of solutions she has found to adapt to the ‘new normal’.

“We see this book as a tool for talking about gentrification. We want this book to trigger questions and conversations between people of different backgrounds about how we can make cities more inclusive and more affordable for all. This is also why we’re developing community activities.

And, I’m a first-generation migrant woman from Turkey. So, for me personally, this is also about being one of the representations for young women in the Netherlands and Turkey with diverse cultural backgrounds. It is important for me that they see me, someone looking like them, and think: if she is able to do it, I can too.”

“Gentrification is a big topic and has various effects, that can be seen as both positive and negative. We chose to focus on residential displacement, which is one of the many negative impacts of gentrification and one of the most urgent ones. In this case, the neighbourhoods that are being gentrified become less inclusive; the socio-economic structure of the area changes, and access to living there becomes affordable only to certain groups of people.

This phenomenon is state-led both in Turkey and the Netherlands and is conducted with very similar motivations, coming from neoliberal urban planning policies. Both countries promote the neighbourhoods to the international real estate investors in real estate fairs or by offering tax benefits. In a recent study analysing gentrification in the districts of Tarlabaşı in Istanbul and in the Indische Buurt in Amsterdam scholars pointed out there was a stigmatisation of the residents based on their ethnical background. Both states use exhaustion as a tool to push people out of their neighbourhoods.

One of the most obvious differences is that in Turkey the process is much more aggressive. For example, a building crane can show up in a neighbourhood quite suddenly and tear several houses down. In the Netherlands the process spans a much longer period which allows the owner to easily change housing contracts. These days ‘flexible’ contracts are used for shorter leases which constitutes a complete break with previous contracts that protected the renters’ rights. Not to forget that there are of course local differences between Lombok and De Kolenkit, and Piyalepaşa and İsmetpaşa. But we do not have enough time to delve into these other aspects.”

“To a certain extent, yes. Even though the various approaches used by the municipality and the contractors involved in the gentrification are different, in all cases, different communities or certain groups of people are moving out of the neighbourhoods. In İsmetpaşa people would be pushed out more forcefully whereas in Piyalepaşa people would choose to sell the land they own and leave. In both places some people also left due to safety concerns caused by the rise in drug trafficking. In Lombok, higher classes would take over the neighbourhood as an ‘exotic place to live’ and in De Kolenkit, which was declared one of the most unsafe residential areas in Amsterdam a few years ago, the change is similar to that in Lombok, but more drastic. In these four neighbourhoods, the people that are forced out of their homes share similar anecdotes and socio-economic backgrounds.”

“It has affected the project quite significantly. In general terms, the progress was slowed down and a third of our project needed to be cancelled. We were going to organise workshops with children and conversations with the residents about gentrification and fair cities around this time of the year in Turkey. It is unfortunate, we were looking forward to this period so much.”

“I selected the four illustrators personally. There is one from each city to visualise that city’s story because I wanted to add a layer of their personal connection to their cities. Each of them has a personal and unique style and is committed to telling stories with an important message. These were the most important elements for my selection.”

Partners of No Seat At The Table are: Creative Industries Fund NL, the Netherlands Institute in Turkey (TR), architectural firm Studyo 501 Mimarlik (TR), creative collective Zitlar Mecmuasi (TR), cultural centres RAUM (NL), Podium Mozaïek (NL) and De Voorkamer (NL).

For funding possibilities, check out our Cultural Mobility Funding Guide or the websites of our partners EYE International, Film Fund, Performing Arts Fund NL, Het Nieuwe Instituut, Dutch foundation for Literature, Mondriaan Fund, Creative Industries Fund NL, the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Ankara and the Consulate General in Istanbul.

Check out the complete overview of Dutch cultural activities in Turkey in our database. If you are a cultural professional who wants to go to Turkey, feel free to contact our Turkey advisor Yasemin Bagci. If you have questions about cultural cooperation with Turkey during corona, please visit our special information page.