2017 artists in the residence at Castrum Peregrini supported by the Mondriaan Fund
March & April 2017: Pieter Paul Pothoven
The work of Pieter Paul Pothoven (1981, NL) comprises sculpture, installation, and includes different forms of writing as well. In his projects, he searches for alternative ways of engaging with the past through study of historical sites, artifacts and resources, in order to mediate new relationships with history often based on their potential use-value in the present.
During a 2-month residency at Castrum Peregrini, he will continue to study socialist resistance before, during and after the Second World War in Amsterdam. Central to his project is a comparative study of three groups that organized their actions in radically different times but share similar motives.
Pieter Paul Pothoven received his BFA at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam (NL) and his MFA at Parsons The New School of Design, New York. He was a resident at Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown (US), Van Eyck Academie, Maastricht (NL) and Instituto Sacatar, Salvador (BR). His work has been shown in various solo and group exhibitions. Recent exhibitions include: ‘You talkin’ to me?’, Barbara Seiler, Zürich (CH); ‘Sunsets never looked as stunning as through the haze of factory sooth’, Van Eyck Acadamie, Maastricht (NL); ‘Territorial Drift’, Garage, Rotterdam (NL); ‘Listen to the Stones, think like a mountain’, Tatjana Pieters, Ghent (BE); ‘Lapis Lazuli from Serr-i-Sang’, PuntWG, Amsterdam (NL); ‘11:59, on a date of no particular significance’, Hudson D. Walker gallery, Provincetown (US); ‘The intelligence of Things’, The Kitchen, New York (US). He initiated and co-curated ‘Weight of Colour’, a symposium about the materiality of color, Amsterdam (NL) and the group exhibition ‘I scarcely have the right to use this ghostly verb’, New York, (US). His texts have been published in amongst others: Anamesa Journal, Simulacrum, Volume, De Gids and Beyroutes, an Alternative Guide to Beirut. Currently he lives and works in Amsterdam. pieterpaulpothoven.com
October & November 2017: Aimée Zito Lema
Rond de Jambe, video still, 2015
Expanding an insignificant event, isolating a sudden movement, choosing an affective gesture and zeroing in on it until we lose ourselves in the sounds it emits, the grain of the photo or the word that names it, furnishes us with a chance to reinterpret the events as they are presented to us, and of understanding history from new perspectives.
The Subversive Body, 2016 / Installationview @ Wilfried Lentz Rotterdam/ Photo: Sander van Wettum
Aimée Zito Lema grounds her practice in this premise. Based on a process of selection and appropriation, Zito Lema zooms in on the detail of gestures, often by using archive images taken of working class demonstrations or counter-cultural movements. This motif, once enlarged almost to the point of abstraction, brings to mind the mechanism that enables cooperation and development within a community, or a movement, or an affective structure than bonds a group or a family. It is revealed to us in her work, just as a tiny detail can give rise to a community spirit and all that this brings with it. Her artistic practice structures the narrative around the process, triggering a dynamic that, taken together, lends meaning to the work. The idea leads to an expression, act or performance. This work in turn gives rise to the object that, inasmuch as a metaphor, returns us to the expression from which it came, only to be recycled and give birth to new possibilities.*
For her residency at Castrum Peregrini Zito Lema will focus on the role of friendship within adverse social-political circumstances. She will research different notions of friendship in political contexts, taking as starting point the history of the house of Gisele van Waterschoot. Looking at past and present, searching for traces of these notions of friendship, understood as solidarity and support structure.
Portrait Aimée: Photo by Hugo Tillman
Visual artist Aimée Zito Lema (born in Amsterdam, 1982, grew up in Buenos Aires) studied at the University of the Arts, Buenos Aires, the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam, and followed the Master Artistic Research program of the Royal Academy in The Hague (2009 – 2011). She was artist-in-resident at the Rijksakademie (2015-2016). Her recent exhibitions include: The 11th Gwangju Biennale; The Dorothea von Stetten Award, Kunstmuseum Bonn; Hors Pistes: L’art de la Revolte, Centre Pompidou Paris (all in 2016); the long-term project Body at Work at Casco, Utrecht (2013 – 2014); and the residency ‘Het Vijfde Seizoen’, Den Dolder, (2011).