The Sightless Seeing series addresses the many ambivalent feelings culture can trigger and embodies the instability of art: vulnerable yet powerful; provocative to some, invisible to others.
This long-term project started in 2012 with Sightless Seeing #1: Rembrandtpark, a performance-study around sculptures in public space. It was sparked by the coincidence of two unrelated events in the Netherlands: massive art cuts and a significant increase of outdoor art theft (for trafficking of valuable metals).
To address some of these contradictory feelings and to bypass dominant art-historical readings, the performance took the form of a touch tour – a guided visit where artworks or replicas cannot only be observed, but also touched.
Sightless Seeing #2: Tessels Oogh (2015) was the perfect occasion to zoom closer into iconoclasm. For the last episode of the performance-series ‘Nightly Dwellings’ in the Oude Kerk the audience was sensorily transported back to 1566, the year in which the Oude Kerk fell victim to iconoclastic fury. As the church gradually fell dark in the evening, memories of those times were reawakened. Objects destroyed and stories fallen into obscurity were brought back to life, in this ‘nocturnal wandering’ employing sound and tactility rather than visible means.
The series continued in 2018 at Arti & Amicitae in Amsterdam during Festival FLAM VIII / Encounter. In the performance-tour Sightless Seeing #3: inside A&A, two sight-impaired guides led visitors around a contemporary art exhibition. Through a number of sensory rituals that recalled the past and sculpt the present, the audience was encouraged to speculate about what we could (no longer) see.
In 2020, two new Sightless projects saw the light. Sightless Seeing #4: Acquisitions is a further collaboration with actor Leroy de Böck and heritage specialist and performer Alicia Hoost. Especially for the Stedelijk Museum, we created a performance disguised as a tour through the exhibition In the Presence of Absence. Through self-designed rituals and stories, two fictional guides question dominant means of acquiring knowledge and experiencing culture. Visitors discover how language, the body, and imagination enables them to look “through” the works on display. Like the tours before, this performance was accessible for persons with or without visual impairments.
Sightless Seeing#4: Acquisitions, performance. Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2022) Photo Maarten Nauw
Sightless Seeing #5 is a close collaboration with the roving arts initiative Suns & Stars (Marjoca de Greef and Anastasija Pandilovska). The project has given birth to a number of interventions in and around the former Theatre Institute Nederland (TIN) Collection which is stored in a large depot in Amsterdam Zuid-Oost. The performance Sightless Seeing #5: Black Box, developed with actor Leroy de Böck, is a remote quest into the TIN-collection. With the help of a tactile scale model, Leroy revives the archive’s afterimages in his mind, uncovering objects that used to act in the spotlights. His visual impairment encourages us to also activate our ears and hands, and find paths to knowledge other than the gaze. Black Box creates small openings in the closeted memories of generations of theatre makers and lovers
In the tactile video-installation Sightless Seeing #5: Remember by Heart a scale model of the theatre depot is explored, customized, and marked with tactile arrows and braille numbers. Leroy rehearses the text and demonstrates one of the exercises created to prepare the visitors’ senses for time travel in the depot.
The soundwork Sightless Seeing #5: Marble Hall is a collaboration with composer Martijn Tellinga. In this piece, actor Leroy de Böck counts his steps in one space to remember how to find his way in another. Martijn recorded both spaces and combined them into an 8-minute sound work. Follow this link to hear the work, please wear headphones when listening.
Sightless Seeing #5: “Jan Hessels 1989” is an attempt to capture the memory of my dance teacher Jan Hessels in fragrant form. Our work in the theatre depot triggered lost memories from my past life as a dancer and questions about the archiving of performance: how to conserve such embodied practices in a multi-sensorial manner? Each page of this publication has been infused with Jan’s scent as recalled from 1989 recreated by Liza Witte. The text fragments come from letters Liza and I exchanged while trying to reconstruct Jan’s scent and spirit. The strips ought to be set on fire to release the smell: here, burn after reading means to remember, not to forget.
Sightless #1: Rembrandtpark
Concept, development, text:
Sarah van Lamsweerde
Guides:
Anneke Kuilman and Cornelis
Cameo appearance:
Janneke Raaphorst
Graphic design:
Angela Lidderdale
Tour hosts VLLA Remark:
Bert Kramer en Marie-José Hamers
Sightless #2: Tessels Oogh
Concept, development, text:
Sarah van Lamsweerde
Performance:
Leroy de Böck, Tanguy Breton, Marianne Geurtsen, Alicia Hoost, Stephanie Pan
Vocal Composition:
Stephanie Pan
Graphic Design braille handout:
Paul Gangloff
Curated by:
Fleur van Muiswinkel for ‘Nachtelijke Dwaling #11” Oude Kerk, Amsterdam
Sightless #3: Inside A&A
Concept, development, text:
Sarah van Lamsweerde
Text and performance:
Leroy de Böck, Alicia Hoost, Stephanie Pan
Curated by:
Rose Akras and Titus Elias for FLAM Encounters 2018, Arti & Amicitiae Amsterdam
Sightless #4: Acquisitions
Concept, development, text:
Sarah van Lamsweerde in collaboration with Leroy de Böck and Alicia Hoost
Text and performance:
Leroy de Böck and Alicia Hoost
Costumes:
Janneke Raaphorst
Curated by:
Fadwa Naamna and Britte Sloothaak for “In the Presence of Absence” Proposals for Stedelijk Museum Collection 2020, Amsterdam
Sightless #5: The Tin Collection / Rehearsing the Archive / Jan Hessels 1989 / Marble Hall
Concept, development, text:
Sarah van Lamsweerde
Text and performance:
Leroy de Böck
Camera and editing:
Alina Ozerova
Sound composition:
Martijn Tellinga
Scent design:
Liza Witte
Graphic design:
Anastasija Pandilovska
Curated by:
Suns & Stars (Marjoca de Greef and Anastasija Pandilovska) for “In the pause of a gesture there might be an echo” in the frame of Collective Domain of Cultural Memory 2019/2020
These works were made possible with the support of The Amsterdam Fund for the Arts (AFK), the Mondriaan Fund, Prins Bernhard Fonds Noord-Holland and Creative Europe.
[…] in the two cases of religion and science, when the hand is shown at work, it is always a hand with a hammer or with a torch: always a critical, a destructive hand. But what if hands were actually indispensable to reaching truth, to producing objectivity, to fabricating divinities? What would happen if, when saying that some image is human-made, you were increasing instead of decreasing its claim to truth?[1]
In a strange coïncidence with the massive 2012 art cuts in the Netherlands, more and more cases of theft or vandalization of public artworks were reported in the press. Main targets seemed to be bronze sculptures, with copper prices high enough for people to want to saw up statues, even if the street value of the booty is very low in comparison to the market value of, for instance a Rodin Sculpture.
Art in public space has an interesting status, it’s one of those few public resources citizens still share, and this collective ‘ownership’ traditionally yields very outspoken declarations of love or hatred for a particular work of art in the open air. But amputating a monument for a couple of hundred euro’s is a new development in the history of art and conflict. These circumstances made me wonder whether some of these sculptures would need protection.
Asked to participate in a research group on art in public space, I proposed a (never realized) performance in which a bodyguard or a curator[2] would spend the night with a statue, as an embodiment of a kind of loyal impotence: an outlet for my frustration of the prevalent indisposition to stand up for the arts collectively.
One of Rodin’s Thinkers, stolen from the Singer Museum in Laren (NL) and mutilated with saws
During a research residency near Amsterdam’s Rembrandtpark, it became clear that public sculptures are vulnerable to some and invisible for others. To literally embrace this invisibilty, a “Sightless Seeing”-walk was organized for an audience of seeing and visually impaired visitors: a touch-tour around a selection of public artworks, in which sculptures were described as well as touched.
Police with stolen works from Fontana sculpture garden in Groningen (NL)
To prepare for the very first Sightless Seeing TEST tour, I spent a few weeks investigating the public artworks in Amsterdam Nieuw-West.
The city has put up a website with the sculptures per borough. I used that virtual map to try and track down the actual works in the area.
Cycling in and around Rembrandtpark, I often got lost, going around in circles, ending up “on the wrong end of town”. Some sculptures have disappeared or nature has grown over them. I started to feel like a cold case detective, accosting people with photographs of my missing subjects. This project is a big challenge for disoriented people like me.
But some artworks appeared where they should. For instance the sculpture “Twee Cirkels, 45 graden gedraaid” (“Two Circles, twisted at 45 degrees”) by artist Rob Schreefel, installed in the park in 1983. The biggish white object seems insignificant at first. But the longer I look at it, the more I notice its dynamic dimension. I can imagine sculptors appreciating the ingenious stone twisted into opposite circular shapes. It is true that from every angle it seems to point at something else in the park. The granite feels nice to touch. Only later, on the pictures, I see how much it looks like a stranded barge.
‘Groot Landschap’ (1974) by Wessel Couzijn in Sloterpark Amsterdam (NL)
‘Magneten’(1974) by Lies Maes, Koningin Wilhelminaplein, Amsterdam (NL)
‘Twee Cirkels, 45 graden gedraaid’(1983) Rob Schreefel, Rembrandtpark, Amsterdam (NL)
About 2 weeks before the day of the tour I started mapping out the route more specifically.
Many sculptures in Slotervaart (and elsewhere) have been placed out of reach: behind fenced school yards, within entrance halls or high up on top of buildings. Technically, this is still public space, although isolating these artworks underlines the way in which the collective has become increasingly compartmentalized.
Public art inevitably reflects how authority wishes to represent itself. Clearly the times for rulers on high horses and princes on plinths are over. Still, sometimes these artworks winking at me from a distance seem even more frustratingly untouchable.
Shouldn’t one just accept that art is vulnerable and find new ways to anticipate its potential (mis)use?
Time for tests: walking the routes with one of the guides, Anneke Kuilman and our latest accessory: mobile steps. When looking for a way to give better access to the big sculptures, the thought of a hybrid object emerged: between stair and pedestal, allowing visitors to reach the top of the sculpture but also temporarily transforming participants into live sculptures. This variation on a “roltrap” was designed with and crafted by artist Bert Kramer.
Hopefully, including sculptures that are ‘too big to feel’, can trigger questions about the relation between sensory preception and imagination : will both seeing and visually impaired visitors “fill in the blanks” with their mind, and if yes, how do these processes differ?
Guide Anneke Kuilman testing a wall-relief in Amsterdam Nieuw-West (NL)
image Sarah van Lamsweerde
image Sarah van Lamsweerde
Guide Anneke Kuilman with ‘Rembo’(2005) by Bastienne Kramer in Rembrandtpark, Amsterdam Nieuw-West (NL)
image Sarah van Lamsweerde
image Sarah van Lamsweerde
When trying to describe this first “Sightless Seeing test”, there are many different levels of impressions converging. Walking blindly through heavy rain, bright sun, along stone pavements, soggy grassfields, echoing tunnels, windy plaza’s, rustling trees and zooming traffic, escorted by a previously unknown personal guide with a cloud of other softer voices in the background: this was already a lot to take in, not to mention having a blind date with 5 different sculptures.
Sensory overload or not, I think the walk from one sculpture to another gave the seeing visitors a much stronger experience then expected. The persons in the group with lower or no vision were obviously more used to this situation where perception is challenged to function in different ways.
image Ania Harre
image Ania Harre
image Ania Harre
image Ania Harre
image Sarah van Lamsweerde
image Ania Harre
[1] Bruno Latour What is Iconoclash? Or is there a world beyond the image wars ? page 18, MIT Press 2002
[1] Latin curator “one who has care of a thing, a manager, guardian, trustee”
*The TIN-collection was once housed in a monumental Herengracht canal-house, which was forced to close as a result of severe cuts to cultural budgets in the Netherlands in 2011. The TIN-collection contains more than half a million artifacts and documents. In 2012, the Allard Pierson Museum took the collection under its wings and is now contemplating how to present parts of this collection to the public again.
