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This more than person sized print (260x188cm) of a part of the starry sky by Thomas Ruff from 1992 I found beautiful and impressive. Deep glossy black, which you don’t see in the photo. Several were on display at the Centre Pompidou in Metz, where I saw them early this week. The image shows me in a self portrait, and other visitors to the museum against the backdrop of stars.
A gift from my colleagues. ‘Tegeltjeswijsheid’ means ’tile-wisdom’ or the often somewhat cliché phrases that are printed on tiles as an old fashioned type of decoration. We moved into new offices this January (in the same building), and since then everyone of us is getting their own tile with some characteristic phrase etc. about them. Yesterday I received mine. It reads “In my notes of 20 years ago I see that…”. A (exaggerated! really!) reference to my personal knowledge management (pkm) system. I indeed regularly inject things into conversations, when some question or topic is discussed along the lines of “last time we discussed this in 201x, we thought this or that, and concluded somesuch”.
Dodenherdenking 2024 / Remembrance Day 2024
I briefly visited the printing workshop of Roy Scholten today. I was there to pick up a print of a kingfisher, the final bird in his 50 bird series of Lego letterpress prints. Roy was printing posters for the upcoming exhibition of the birds lego prints. While we chatted I took a snapshot of these posters on the wall.
The phrase When In Doubt Make Something on the posters reminded me of Shall we make something? from when Peter was visiting us in Enschede and E took him to the local FabLab. Not entirely a coincidence that I had that association, because we had just mentioned Peter, as Roy asked whether E and I had received one of ‘the boxes‘ and mentioned Peter will likely visit in a few weeks. I like the emergence of such connections.
I was pleasantly surprised and intrigued by the work of Diane Scherer. She grows grasses and other plants on a surface in some specific way such that the roots form patterns. Then she turns the grass mats over, to show the root patterns as if they are tapestries.
Last weekend E took me on a surprise weekend to celebrate our 25 years together. We visited the Kranenburgh museum in Bergen where the work of Scherer was shown.
We were in Zeeland, in Burgh-Haamstede yesterday and today, meeting up with dear friends who live in Switzerland but were touring the country. We spent some time at the beach at Westenschouwen. In the distance you see part of the Oosterscheldekering, a massive yet semi-permeable sea barrier to keep the province safe from flooding. Built in the decades after the 1953 flood.