10:30 - 13:00: Walk With Tracian Meikle and Rosa Sijben (Route: Gerrit Rietveld Academie to ZuidAs/World Trade Center, Amsterdam) 15-17.00: unsettling Info Day at the Glass Pavilion follows with Dj sets, snacks and information about the unsettling process.
Tracian Meikle (1985) is the co-founder and organizer of the Amsterdam Black Women Collective, a collective committed to creating a nurturing and safe space for black women seeking community. She is also completing a PhD at the University of Amsterdam where she looks at the socio-political work of street art in Kingston, Jamaica.
Rosa Sijben (1988) studied fine arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. In her practice she uses sculptures, installations and performances. She makes you reconsider the nature of objects and actions’ social and aesthetic aspects. Her ‘situational choreographies’ explore the overlap between art and life, areas that make the subjectivity of actions visible. Her work has been shown at KW Berlin, Kunstverein Düsseldorf, SALT Istanbul, Showroom Mama Rotterdam, De Appel, Corridor, W139 and Museum Van Loon in Amsterdam, among others.
For the first in a series of unsettling Walks, Tracian Meikle and Rosa Sijben take us to the installation, Demo which, coming from the Greek word meaning ‘people’, forms part of the GET LOST art route. Consisting of seven building boards that change in colour and shade over several iterations, Demo refers in different ways to political protest (demonstration), a visual explanation or example of a product (demonstrating something). For one iteration of the work, the artist Rosa Sijben collaborated with Tracian Meikle, anthropologist and co-initiator of the Amsterdam Black Women’s collective, to reflect on the experiences of black women in public space in Amsterdam who experience the contradiction of hyper-visibility while simultaneously being constantly overlooked and unheard. During the Unsettling Walk Tracian and Rosa discuss their collaboration, the process of making a commissioned activist artwork in public space, reactions from the neighboring public and their personal feelings about the work.