The new performance, film and installation by Buhlebezwe Siwani, ulwela amaza (2024), traces a deeply embodied choreography that ebbs and flows in a number of significant sites in Amsterdam, Middelburg and their surrounding waters. The work asks how these Dutch cities are connected to Blackness and life, as well as what is known and unknown about histories of presence in and removal from this place. This exhibition will be on show from 30th of November until the 2nd of March 2025.
Countering the landscape urge of the horizon line, the film insists on portraiture, framing the six performers whom the artist works with as time travelling inhabitants of multiple eras and dimensions. Their transient collective and solo scores can be read as invocations of the people who were brought to the Netherlands involuntarily and who now, in the present, choose to remain.
Dredging up long concurrent legacies of slavery, economics, cultural inheritance, the performance interrupts the trappings of VOC and WIC* wealth, while unsettling the grounds of Museumplein – built to host one of the earliest colonial “world” exhibitions which put people from occupied territories on display. Rituals of resistance and belonging are refigured in the studio of the “Dutch Master” Rembrandt whose paintings featured Black folks and who made his work in a neighbourhood formerly inhabited by many communities of Colour. The performers’ gestures take up space in the Bijlmer’s modernist architectural projections, under the watchful eyes of anticolonial activist and WWII resistance hero Anton de Kom.
From Amsterdam Central Station to Middelburg, Siwani’s film navigates the routes and the roots of resources and bodies on whom the so-called Golden Age was built. Middelburg: once a hub of colonial trade, is also where vessels destined to transport thousands of abducted people were built and repaired. It is here by the sea, and in the church – which has been both an instrument and opposer of such atrocities – where ancestral realms are brought forth through sacrament and song. Reclaiming these infrastructures, the performance calls the souls of those cast adrift to rest, and the living to bear witness.
In these many ways, Siwani’s immersive installation and program draw to the surface the lives and memories that constitute an essential and erased part of this place’s selective story. The waters have been stirred, and they speak to different sensibilities, implicating all who watch and listen.
*VOC: Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (Dutch East India Company); WIC: West-Indische Compagnie (Dutch West India Company) – both these colonial trading companies were established in the early 1600s and disbanded over a century later.
