Dear supporters, dear friends,

Thank you very much for making this happen! The working period in Biella and Shköder has been very beneficial to me and my work.
Hopefully, a more insightful and personal e-mail has reached you by now, where I share with you more about "The Encounter", my encounter.

Yam këtu/ I am here is the work I made during this short residency. It is a small work, but a big step for me in terms of getting on a different working track. I hope you will all come and see some of the first results at my next exhibition during This Art Fair, in Decembe, for which you will receive an invitation soon.

If you can't make it during This Art Fair, don't worry. There will be plenty of other occasions and new works coming up.

All needs time to sink now, to find its way. It is time to lock myself up in the studio and work work work, read read read. You will be hearing less from me than you have in the past three months. But don't hesitate to write to me, call me, come say "hi" at my studio, ask more questions.

I cannot thank you enough for giving me this precious time, these two weeks in Biella and Shköder, new friends & new work. Thank. You.

Until the 26th of September, you can still visit the exhibition "Notebooks". During the exhibition, the basement at Peer is dedicated to notebooks from artists, designers and writers. Visitors are welcome to flip through all the notebooks, a one-off opportunity to dive into the maker’s thought process.

I want to share this exhibition with you, in particular, because one of my recent notebooks is also part of it. In this notebook you can find the first, scattered thoughts that eventually evolved into my current research on distance. Also, the very first drawing of my current workis included in the notebook (because it started as a note/ sketch).

The same notebook was with me last year during my previous residency program at UNIDEE and the following months, so it includes some small experiments and ideas developed in Biella at that time.

"Rearranging America" & "Window notes"

This months Peer hosts not one, not two but three exibithions. So if you are around, it sure is worth stopping by and taking a look.

Upstairs "Rearranging America", work by Devlin Cooper, visually inspired by “ransom notes”. It is poems made with Facebook threads, which are cut up, rearranged, and presented on found wooden boards. The exhibition tackles the current state of America leading towards the elections later this year.

And last but not least, the windows at Peer will be filled with Mako Ishizuka's notes. The artist took notes in public during the opening, communicating private trains of thoughts with all the random passers-by. With the performance, Ishizuka played with the notion of private versus public, with an obvious hint to the surrounding area of the Red Light District.

The Migrant (Moving) Image - Transit: Centro di Permanenza Temporanea

Werk van o.a. Adrian Paci zal te zien zijn in het EYE Museum op 13 September, als onderdeel van EYE on Art. Ik ben erbij! Tickets en meer info hier.

Centro di Permanenza Temporanea (letterlijk Centrum voor Permanente Tijdelijkheid) is de Italiaanse benaming voor uitzetcentra, oftewel detentiecentra. De naam refereert ook aan de tegenstrijdige staat van ‘permanente tijdelijkheid’ waarin veel vluchtelingen en (illegale) migranten verkeren. Multimedia kunstenaars van over de hele wereld schetsen in hun werk een alternatief voor de reflex van de Europese politiek om illegale immigranten buiten te houden door de grenzen van de natiestaat af te grendelen. De hedendaagse cultuur wordt immers bepaald door een staat van ‘permanente transitie’: aan de ene kant het vrije verkeer van data en ideeën in globale netwerken en aan de andere kant de fysieke en vaak illegale verplaatsing van mensen en goederen.

De films in het tweede deel van The Migrant (Moving) Image getuigen van het lot van hen die, getroffen door armoede, oorlogsgeweld of politieke en sociale vervolging, in de staat van transitie terecht zijn gekomen. Mensen die leven in de overgangszone tussen deportatie en conflict, tussen hun vaderland en het land van hun dromen.

De deelnemende kunstenaars zijn afkomstig uit landen als Albanië, Colombia, Marokko, Algerije, Egypte, Peru, Finland en Zimbabwe (Halida Boughriet, Dina Danish, Mounir Fatmi, Karl Ketamo, Gerald Machona, Adrian Paci, Marco Pando en Enrique Ramírez). Kunstenaar Dina Danish zal reflecteren op haar werk en het belang van taal bij het vinden van een nieuw thuis. Ola Mafaalani en Kader Abdollah zullen op de avond spreken.

The Migrant (Moving) Image is ontwikkeld door het Rotterdamse kunstinstituut A Tale of a Tub; curator is Nathanja van Dijk, in samenwerking met EYE. Het Mondriaan Fonds, DeltaPORT Donationfund en Mendes Wood DM traden op als subsidient. De presentatie bij EYE wordt ondersteund door het Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst.

Opening: 7 August 15:00 - 19:00 . facebook RSVP

In "Distance as time, distance as sound, distance as words," we will shows a storyline throughout the space, the results of how the workshop participants and I explored our physical experience of the surroundings in Amsterdam. The project is part of my residency at the Open Atelier of Peer Paper Platform and is kindly sponsored by the AFK.

During the residency, we invited 6 people from different disciplines to research how their identities relate to their place of residence: Amsterdam. The starting points of our research are the individual walks from our front doors to Peer.

The participants in the workshop are artists, ethnologists, writers, and video artists: Marta Colpani, Elisa Fiore, Esther Brakenhoff, Dorin Budusan, Leslie Newhall, Liesbeth Wieggers, and Annemarie Cilon.

Curious to see what we found on our walks? Come to the opening on 7 August from 15:00 - 19:00 at Peer Paper Platform, Oudezijds Achterburgwal 133. Exhibition on display until 29 August.

Dear donor, thank you for supporting my project! We already reached 62% of the total amount that I am collecting. Getting close!

Come meet at the open studio

The coming two weeks I will be working at Peer Paper Platform, continuing my current experiment with collecting text, sound and movements by walking in Amsterdam.

Every morning, I walk from my house to Peer and make drawings and write down the words that I find on the street.

During the past week I started a pencil mural with these words on the wall of the open studio.

Opening hours

I hope you can come see this and more work-in-progress and have a chat, especially if you are curios about what I do or if you feel like hanging out together in the center of Amsterdam.

Peer opens its doors from 10:00 to 18:00, every day from Wednesday to Saturday. On Sunday you are also welcome to visit, although we will be busy developing new work in the workshop.

Address: Oudezijds Achterburgwal 133, Amsterdam.