Public Programme | 16.12.2022 | PrintRoom (NL)

The concluding event of our Between Four Walls program took place at PrintRoom, Rotterdam, within the overarching framework of PrintRoom’s seminar Journeys Across Archive. Journeys Across Archives featured a series of presentations, each recollecting subversive processes towards archiving, mapping, and re-envisioning existing ‘environments’ — as much in the literal as metaphorical sense.

Ratu R Saraswati and the artistic research collective To See the Inability to See (Arefeh Riahi, Maartje Fliervoet and Martín La Roche Contreras) presented performative readings. These readings arose from their respective contributions to 16 10 20.

Through an essayistic and performative process, To See the Inability to See weaves stories, thoughts and visual material together with books and objects from various archives. In a pragmatic way the collective tries to temporarily bring those together to allow them to narrate a new story. Some of the topics that its research is concerned with are exclusion, alienation and belonging.

Ratu R Saraswati (Saras) creates stories that emerge from everyday encounters that she believes are not coincidental. A mother of a dead meerkoet, a captivated Java kancil: she wishes to tell the stories of the beings of the city of Amsterdam, a city far away from her home in Java island.