Multimedia-artist working with video, photography and installation, based in Rotterdam.
DIGITAL ARCHIVAL MATERIAL COLLECTED ON SEPERATE FLASH DRIVES
2024
From September 2023 - May 2024 I took part in talent development program Lighthouse, developed and with support of Stichting FOTODOK in Utrecht. During this program we developed our entrepeneurship and grew our networks, with the help of tutors and external experts provided to us from within the program. Together with 9 other young lens-based artists we organised a theatrical network dinner on May 15th, to say farewell to our time at FOTODOK and challenged ourselves to come up with small, bite-sized ways in which we could share some of our work with our guests.
I chose to gift every guest we invited a unique flash drive on which I uploaded archival files I encountered on digital archives online. The challenge I set myself was to find a way to connect myself and my practice to the files I gifted on the drives. In order to achieve that, I set out to find files, ranging from images, video’s and audio files, that were produced in the year 1999, the same year in which I was born. Something unique those files and I have in common, is the year in which we started living and experiencing, but more so, each of us grew up alongside the same internet, and witnessed its development parallel to ours. B
Each flash drive contained a unique selection and variety of files, so that the guests would have to share information and exchange drives to be able to see them all. And for each drive I made a matching foldable publication, that gave the guest information about the file, like the date it was produced, the name of the user that uploaded it, or the amount of likes or comments it got.
It still comforts me, to think that these flash drives live somewhere, in the bottom of someone’s purse, forgotten at a community printer at the library, or stowed away safely in a little box with other flash drives. And the files that were given a home within these drives have been caressed again by stranger’s eyes.
Maybe someday one or more of the drives will find their way back to me, or be used to store additional files, in any way it feels like they carry a part of me and are being kept and loved again.
