In Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-portrait and Other Ruins, a book about blindness and drawing, writer Derrida at one point wonders whether drawing and writing are not always blind acts. When you put the pen down on paper, the spot between the tip of the pen and the paper is always invisible to the person holding the pen. Only when you move the pen does a trace of visibility appear. It is a poetic way of describing that every medium has a blind spot, it makes things visible and obscures them at the same time, because it is simply not possible to show everything.

Dean Bowen and Bert Scholten both started from the question of whether it is possible to strip a given of its symbolism and thus, in a way, emphasize the blind spot it carries within itself.

Poet Dean Bowen started with the idea of ​​using language as a physical material to work with and in this way to push the meaning of the words, the stanzas and perhaps an entire poem more into the background. He wanted to see letters as geometric shapes instead of carriers of meaning. In this process, Bowen became aware of the fact that language has a masking function. It inevitably leaves things out of consideration and, like any other medium, is unable to reproduce the fullness of reality.

This led to a large work on black fabric that literally blinds part of the space. It provides a glimpse into the world behind a poem, the notepad. The unfiltered ideas that may not all have ended up in the poem are criss-crossed across the canvas.

It corresponds with the other work that is presented. This poem is constantly in motion, because it consists of several pages that can be slid over each other. By placing the stanzas of several poems over each other, under and above each other, a different text is created each time. A poem that is constantly in the making. Through an inventive process of text editing, there is a meaning between the stanzas for a while, only to disappear again a moment later. What remains are raw forms of language that point out the blind spots in our communication in order to seek more connection.

Bert Scholten, musician and artist, used a similar process in his search for two ravens. Initially, he was intrigued by the layered sound of the raven's voice. This does not only consist of the familiar croaking, but also, for example, of the reproduction of sounds of human voices. This search took him to a place outside Amsterdam. Two ravens are said to have nestled somewhere in a high-voltage mast near a power station, an undefined area between the city and the outside world.

While filming and thinking out loud, he wanted to get to know these ravens better. Perhaps he could look beyond the cultural stigmas that the raven carries with it: a symbol for evil, anger and unreliability. Is it possible to represent the ravens in a way that is stripped of this dominant symbolism? Is it possible to see the ravens as ravens?

Instead of drawing the bird itself, Scholten began to record the raven's flight patterns. He superimposed these different versions of patterns to see which new images emerged from them. Between the searching lines, he wrote short sentences and questions that could be seen as a letter to the two birds.

In the exhibition, the artists relate to their medium, their subject and the place and context in which they work in a new way. This multitude of perspectives all come together in the exhibition Ontdoen. 

It was created in the context of the exhibition series Half Rhyme, where collectivity and social practice are central. How can publishing be used to bring people together and thus put political or social issues on the agenda and perhaps even initiate change? It builds on the series Altered Breath and also consists of work periods and exhibitions with a focus on the commons. Commons are shared natural resources such as water, air and land, but also information sources such as texts, images and programming language. They are accessible to all members of a society. But above all, commons can be defined as a social practice in which a resource is not managed by a state or a market, but by a community of users or in this case: artists.

Artists and writers work for three months in the graphic studios of Plaatsmaken. Because they make editions, there is the possibility to share the prints in a collective archive. In this way, new commons are created. During their residency at Plaatsmaken, the participating artists can use the editions from the archive as a starting point for new work. Continuing where another has left off

This exhibition was on sight till May 31, 2024

With thanks to Gemeente Arnhem, the Mondriaan Fund and Lira Fonds