Folly/Moria I - Triptych
Oil, Pigment, Acrylics and Chalk on Canvas -
360x170cm

Folly/Moria I was created under the impression of my last journey to the Mediterranean. When I returned home I lifted the colors and lightness of this experience onto the canvas. My preoccupation at the time was  our failing chase for control and domination of our environment and fate. This sense informs our era of climate change and its (pandemic) effects, the contrast between of our ever growing scientific knowledge and technological capabilities and our ethical and political failure to employ these forces in solidarity for a better world. In conversation with the figure of the fool - one foot over the abyss and the eyes on the sky -and the music of Arcangelo Corelli, in particular his piece Follia, I explore the desire for relinquishing control and surrendering to a melancholic ease that accepts the collective and individual failure of human control domination. 

Folly/Moria II 

The second triptych Folly/Moria arose from the dark underbelly of Mediterranean as a space of trauma and a flight line. Upon returning from the Mediterranean the idea took root to interpret the schizophrenia of a space that is at once a vacationing spot and mass grave for those refugees who do not survive the dangerous passage. One geographic space reveals a maddening split that is at the heart of the European construct: to deny plurality to police borders where migration and exchange have always been the norm, a norm from which Europe profits economically while denying the (in-)human dimensions of it.  The Mediterranean as the cradle of European civilisation and as the site on which the perversion of this civilisation becomes evident: order within the borders of Europe is maintained at the cost of creating chaos in its periphery. The center and the periphery, order and chaos, delight and horror, these binaries influence the two triptychs. Folly/Moria II interprets a satellite image of the refugee camp Moria as a site where the imposed European order collapses, where lives are put on halt indefintely.