A Personal Gesture 2020 - present
November 8 2022 - July 7 2023: the arm is with Nancy Jouwe.
Stopover
The next stop for A Personal Gesture was on November 8, 2022, where the hand was offered to me while I formally started my three-year Fellowship at the Loods of the HKU, which houses the MA Fine Arts. I had taught there for four years, now shifting into a new and more open role. The students from both years one and two have their workspaces at the Loods, the lecturers do their lectures and tutorials in the space, food is eaten plus the graduation party take place there (a very important rite of passage), making it an ultimate space of student life, work, community, creativity and friendship. As both the passing on and receiving of the sculpture is an expression of friendship and appreciation, the HKU Loods was a perfect place for that moment.
The sculpture accompanied my inaugural lecture for the fellowship that spoke on how Dutch history is silencing its colonial and slavery past, while this past resonates in the present. Starting point of my fellowship is the book publication Slavery and the city of Utrecht (2021) which I co-edited with Remco Raben and Matthijs Kuipers and which was commissioned by the mayor of Utrecht. Based on the book publication, the mayor had formally apologized in February 2022, for the cities’ involvement in the history of slavery. This is particularly important because Utrecht does not look at itself as being involved with colonial history and our joint work has debunked that notion. The hand with its presence and meaning, emphasized the precarity of history and how easily it is forgotten and moreover, silenced. Simultaneously, the hand as a gesture gave strength to the fellowship to open up this conversation and invite others to join that conversation. With staff, lecturers and students present, that is exactly what happened. After this meaningful event, we decided as a Loods team, to then move the hand to the offices of HKU fine arts, directly opposite the Loods, where it accompanied our thinking and talking processes, not wanting to leave the sculpture too open to the hustle and bustle of the course.
New destination: atelier/workspace of costume designer and fellow at ATD (Academy of Theater and Dance), Carly Everaert
The sculpture spent several months at the HKU and served as a spiritual and material presence and guide for the fellowship at HKU, with meaningful moments that resonated such as my entry into the Raad voor Cultuur (Council for Culture) as a crown member in February 2023, and the formal apology for the Dutch involvement with slavery by the Dutch political leadership in December 2022.
A Personal Gesture was handed over during the Keti Koti Month of June 2023, to costume designer Carly Everaert on June 26. Carly was on my list for a long time but as they and I are both avid travelers – thanks to our work and transnational connections - it was quite a challenge to find the right moment. The sculpture was brought to their atelier in the Amsterdam Houthavens area and I could tell the sculpture immediately felt at home, back in the space of an artist with transnational ties and the energy of decades of dedicated work within the arts.
Carly Everaert is an award-winning costume designer. In 2023 they won the Proscenium prize for their extensive oeuvre. Both for Carly and me, with ties to the 80s and 90s Dutch squatters and women’s movements, art and activism are somehow interconnected. ‘Detaching yourself from the status quo is a live long process’, is one of their statements, and it defines very much how they approach their work. Carly believes that this time, with a larger emphasis on critically engaging with and even disrupting norms around gender, race and the body, is their time. While doing the work more intuitively in earlier years, including an obvious love for a sustainable work ethic, today’s world provides Carly with a public discourse where they are less lonely and more at home. I wanted to celebrate that notion with providing them with the care of the sculpture, this personal gesture from me to them which is also political, as we both know that the personal is political.
Nancy Jouwe, she/her
© Nancy Jouwe, July 2023
2023 © rinihurkmans
