Home: An Unfinished Project

Performance times:

Friday 8 April, 7–8 pm: Open Rehearsal Part 1
Saturday 9 April, 3–4 pm: Open Rehearsal Part 2

Friday 15 April, 7–8 pm: Performance
Saturday 16 April, 3–4 pm: Performance

Friday 22 April, 7–8 pm: Performance Finissage
Saturday 23 April, 3–4 pm: Performance Finissage

“If the body is a home, who is our neighborhood?” This question was the starting point to develop Home: An Unfinished Project, a performance-based exhibition by the participants of this year’s edition of our program Collective Learning in Practice (CLIP). Home: An Unfinished Project is a motion reimagining gridded neighborhoods into dynamic rhizomes; reinventing familiar structures; creating different colored roots that support community development; encountering tensions, ideas of freedom, and the many different paces of others; of touching rough edges; of making connections.

A “live” exhibition, Home: An Unfinished Project opens to the public on 8 April, with new movements performed and physical elements added, removed, or transformed over two weeks. Staged in the second-floor galleries of Kunstinstituut Melly, the exhibition follows a choreographic score of movements and play. The project aims to foster reconnection; of being still while moving; as well as to express an array of feelings, from being pushed in-between things; of being pulled away from things; and of being eager to find air, roots, and balance. Read the curatorial statement on this page, below.

Home: An Unfinished Project is a project of the fourth annual edition of CLIP, a six-month work/study program for youth and emerging professionals in Rotterdam. Begun in 2018, the participants of this program have been crucial in Kunstinstituut Melly’s transformation, from inspiring its name change to developing new programming activities. Ten participants are enrolled in this year’s edition of CLIP: Alma Zijderveldt, Bianca Casaburi, Elisa De La Serna Gallego, Je-Anne Dirksz, Lara Silva Santos, Lola den Dunnen, Repelsteeltje, Seré, Simon Mensger, and Yoshi So.

These ten CLIP participants organize Home: An Unfinished Project under the guidance of Amsterdam-based artist and choreographer Karina Villafan and Kunstinstituut Melly’s curator of collective learning, Jessy Koeiman. Besides conceptualizing and performing the exhibition’s score, they have also commissioned the exhibition’s set design to Ludmila Rodrigues, sound/music to Hyunji Jung, and costumes to Eduardo Leon from Avoidstreet. Working closely with them as the producer of this live exhibition is Rotterdam artist Pilar Mata Dupont, who oversees other productions at Kunstinstituut Melly. Emilia Tapprest from nvisible will create the CLIP documentary for 2022.

Click here to learn more about CLIP.

What are we doing?
(Re)imagining the neighborhood into a Rhizome.
In this Rhizome, we have dancing bodies going through different experiences.
Some of these bodies are busy connecting.
Connecting with their own beings.
Some of these bodies are spontaneously becoming, ceaselessly multiplying underground.
These bundled-up bodies are forming a map through the making of movements.
This map serves as a “Home” base where people come together to roam present time and space.
We are creating our own reality by combining the different perspectives of what the word “Home” means to us individually.

How are we doing this?
We are moving.
Whilst being still.
We are shifting through spaces.
In circles. Screaming. Laughing. Running.
At times try to find a balance where we are.
As if we are in our own playground.
Reinventing familiar structures.
Structures with different levels. Levels with different colored roots.
Colors that support our Rhyzome’s growth.
Our huddled bodies are pulling out and towards each other.
This doesn’t stop.
Long ropes give you the chance to make a few knots in Time.
Now bodies are getting caught triggering a longing need for balance.
Seeking eye contact for stability through connection.
A desire to seek these connections can become destructive.
Imagine Crawling horizontally.
Moving through sandy boxes eyes shut.
Dragging baggy objects of nostalgia.
Looking back at these experiences from ending to start with the desire to encounter a new beginning.

Why are we doing this?
For the tension we encounter.
For the feeling of freedom to express at your own pace.
For the roughness between connections.
For the eye contacts in between, pulling away - desiring balance.
Our Rhizome is not the One that becomes Two or even directly three, four, five…
This Rhizome is us (re)imagining hierarchal structures to an anarchic structure through different connections.
With the hope to feel present in different spaces, in different phases in Time surrounded by different objects.
Objects which were left behind through constant movement are experiencing Love by newcomers.
These newcomers are learning how to live as if they already know how to die.

Welcome to the neighborhood, we call it “Home”