In the beautiful Kunsthal Museum in Rotterdam there is one of those exhibitions that should also be done in Italy, because in Italy it is truly time to come to terms with our colonial experience, but like fascism so preponderant, now, in our society even that part of Italian history has been swept under the rug. The exhibition “RECODE REBUILD Wunderkammer of Rotterdam’s colonial past” is curated by the artist Patricia kaersenhout.
In this exhibition there is a small wooden sculpture by Tommy Van der Loo that I wanted to combine with the large bronze sculpture by Thomas J Price “Moments Contained” which is located in front of the Rotterdam station, which made so much talk about itself. The sentence is also a quote from another artist Serana Angelista and translated it says “Not a point but a comma.”
Below are some of the beautiful words accompanying the exhibition by anthropologist and writer Gloria Wekker.
“Guilt, the knowledge that you have profited at someone else’s expense, is not a pleasant feeling.
Money, an estate with a summer house by the river, infrastructure, a network. Guilt is often hidden from view, repelled by other affects: vehement anger, pious denial, fierce resentment, and for many institutions:
the pretext of not understanding,
Guilt is hard to bear,
the confrontation with the inevitable self; therefore guilt, lubricated by a lack of historical knowledge, must be denied.”
