Over a year ago, you started as director at Witte de With. What have you encountered in that year?

It was an intense year and that intensity has to do with a number of things. Taking the job meant moving to a new continent and country. I had to deal with huge cultural differences and was challenged to think about practical questions such as 'how to arrange your administration', 'how to develop projects' and 'how to lead brainstorming sessions' in addition to setting up a new life here. I'm a big fan of the latter, by the way. Here, everything is more structured and consensus-seeking. The culture in New York, which I was part of for a long time, is very different from the culture here.

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Where are these differences in particular?

In New York, competition is very high. Here, other values such as equality prevail. Competition is viewed with suspicion here on the one hand and it is valued among entrepreneurs on the other. You just have to put entrepreneurship in Rotterdam in a different context than entrepreneurship in New York. There are many autonomous, self-initiated projects here, which you also see in New York, but here they take a different form. You therefore define Dutch initiatives in a different way.

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Could you translate your experience in New York to Rotterdam?

Rotterdam is very similar to New York in some ways. Rotterdam is also very diverse, for example. People here are self-aware and entrepreneurial. You see a business entrepreneurship. In New York, people are more concerned with setting up initiatives in a broader sense. It took me time to learn and understand the differences.

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How did you handle that?

I have been exploring all over the country, visiting many museums, art institutions and artists. But I still want to see more. For example, I have not yet been to Tilburg, which is at the top of my list. I have, however, been to Eindhoven several times. I keep a close eye on the Van Abbemuseum's programme. I would also like to spend some free time in the Netherlands, for instance on Texel.

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Did you come across art institutions that inspired you?

The Van Abbemuseum is definitely one of them. I have been following them for a long time and have a lot of respect for what they do. The quality of their exhibitions is high and there is a conceptual complexity. I have also noticed that it is always busy there. It proves yet again that it is a myth that the public stays away if you programme challenging and conceptual art. What I also like is Atelier van Lieshout's Ferrotopia project in Amsterdam-Noord and Framer Framed's programming. They have interesting activities that are really needed in the city.  And I like Casco in Utrecht. They are very unconventional and also indispensable. Nobody does what they do. And then you have the Jan van Eyck academy. I've been there several times now and the energy and spaces there are fantastic. We actually worked together on a publication last summer. We did the research and workshops in Maastricht and launched the publication here, followed of course by a party at my house. That collaboration was really a highlight of the past year. I also visited the open studios at the Rijksakademie in the autumn. After the opening, I went back on a Saturday and it was packed, very impressive. Every space was staged and could be viewed as a separate solo exhibition. It was well organised and they advertised throughout the city. Very inspiring!

Are you also thinking of collaborating with the Rijksakademie?

Both directors, Emily Pethick of the Rijksakademie and Hicham Khalidi of Jan van Eyck, are new. It's crazy to think that I have been here the longest of the three of us! I invited them both to Rotterdam for lunch. All three of us work with international contemporary artists. Many ideas came up, but we haven't established anything yet. The idea is to meet regularly in Rotterdam, Amsterdam or Maastricht and talk further.

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Have there been any other collaborations or initiatives in the past year?

I organised many informal gatherings and dinners at my home for people from the art world such as artists and curators. I still do that now, although I don't always cook myself anymore. However, I always make sure the guest list is diverse enough so that the evening is meaningful. There is a good reason for every invitee to be there. I like to bring people together and really enjoy such evenings.

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Do you have a particular mission with these evenings? Or is it about bringing people together?

I organised many such evenings in New York. In my experience, these activities give people a chance to meet each other and then once they have met collaborations often follow. So it's not so much about bringing people together, but more about encouraging new collaborations. New collaborations bring new ideas, which can be widely supported and form a new community. Besides the public programme and educational activities, I think it is important to create space for informal and long-term exchanges that come about organically. The best projects emerge from chance encounters and conversations that are associative rather than directed. I therefore think it is very important that when people come from abroad, they meet people here and vice versa. That is an important part of our cultural exchange. I see that as our task.

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What exchanges have you organised here?

When Federico Herrero, an artist from Costa Rica, came to Rotterdam, he wanted to tour the places run by artists. There are lots of them in Rotterdam. We organised such a tour followed by lunch at Witte de With. They exchanged ideas on things like making programmes, raising funds and deploying marketing strategies. This way of networking proved very lucrative, which is why we organised a similar event when Mauricio Marcín from Mexico City came here. Marcín focuses mainly on artist publications, so that was also our focus during his tour of the city. It turned out that a number of people from that world had not met before, or had not even heard each other's names. So the tours and lunches, in a way, create a community.

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Besides group exhibitions on the third floor and an educational space on the ground floor, you started presenting solo exhibitions on the second floor. Your main goal with these solo exhibitions is to provide a stage for non-European artists.

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Is there a special focus on Latin American artists within this programming?

A lot of the artists I present are from Latin America because I have worked with them a lot in the past, but my focus here is broader than that. In the early 1990s, you actually saw the same thing happen when Chris Dercon took over as director at Witte de With. He also had a lot of experience with Latin American artists at MoMA PS1 in New York and took that on board. That's an interesting thing. Now, in 2019, we are working with artists from all over the world.
Lawrence Abu Hamdan, for example, is from Beirut, Firelei Báez is from the Dominican Republic and lives in New York City. Melike Lara, a young artist from Germany, explores her Kurdish origins in her work. Mariana Castillo Deball is Mexican and Rossella Biscotti Italian. For the solo exhibitions, we are also collaborating with Michael Stevenson. He lives in Berlin but is originally from New Zealand. And we not only work with international artists but also look for international collaborations. One option would be a collaboration with the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, for example.

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Is there the same focus for the group exhibitions?

Yes, they also have a strong Latin American slant. The other day I gave a lecture in Brussels with the director of Lafayette Anticipations and the director of Wiels. Afterwards, someone came up to me from the audience and asked where I was from. I said 'from Mexico, why do you ask?' She thought I was from the Middle East because so many Arab artists were represented in the group exhibition at Witte de With. So it just depends on what your point of view is. Carlos Motta, for example, is Colombian but developed his work largely in Beirut. My aim was not to make an exhibition about Arab art, but to bring together artists who share a common interest. It is about a prevailing global interest, which is currently alive in the visual art world.

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What topical themes are currently playing an important role?

The main themes are travel and political displacement. For example, the first group exhibition I organised was about artists who had travelled through the Amazon and created works based on their field research. Following that, we made a group exhibition about correspondence and letter exchanges. Those exchanges would not happen if people were not physically removed from each other. People have to travel to get back together, and in the meantime or afterwards, correspondence is used as a means of reducing distance. The exhibition explains that correspondences were on the rise in the 17th century and were unprecedentedly popular. This was partly caused by the flourishing world trade. People travelled a lot and far. There were countless expeditions, new people and new cultures meeting. This is closely linked to globalisation. Globalisation is about movement and connection. New encounters and interpretations are central. The Amazon exhibition was also about new interpretations of the landscape. This was not directly visible, but it was palpable. The group exhibition on show now has another approach. I deliberately chose it that way, because I don't want to suggest that we make a certain type of exhibition. I want to show that you can deal with contemporary art in a dynamic way. The current group exhibition is about 'dropping out': artists who have chosen to step out of the urban environment and leave the art world and their social life there behind. We made a selection of artists who moved to the desert. An empty place, where there is all the room for new possibilities. After this, I want to focus on 'forest immigration', the immigration from south to north, towards the forests.

Do these themes also emerge in the solo exhibitions?

In solo exhibitions, I focus on artists who make research-based works. Artists who go into depth in a methodical way. For example, we invited Ana María Millán, who researched the culture surrounding animation and video games. Ana immersed herself in that world to make it her own. From there, she created her work. Irene Kopelman is another example of an artist moving into a new world and becoming part of it herself. She has moved more into a scientific corner, researching the history of paintings of landscapes and the colours used for them. She has also applied these methods to her own use of colour when creating landscapes.

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What is important is that many exhibitions featuring artists' works based on research come across as very documentary and dry. I try to avoid that and look for the stage where the artist has transformed the research into a sensual experience. Pamela Rosenkranz, for example, can give an academic lecture because she has done in-depth research, but the work is separate from that. It embodies her research but also enters into a relationship with the space. This also allows the audience to experience the knowledge in a different way.

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It is striking that you mention only female artists as examples. Is that also a theme?

Last year, I showed only female artists. This year, they are also in the majority. I don't want to say it's a theme, but it is a conscious decision to support female artists.

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Any news on the naming of Witte de With?

We are currently investigating the situation. We have divided the research into several stages. We started by making timelines to map out who Witte de With was. We included the discussions that arose about decolonisation. We assembled a group of nine young people from Rotterdam. This group is following a fellowship we developed in 2018. It is aimed at young people aged between 18 and 24 with different cultural backgrounds. For instance, two are studying industrial design and a third comes from the music world. They meet on Fridays and Saturdays in the ground-floor exhibition space and are guided by Jessy Koeiman, our new collective learning curator. Over six months, they attended several workshops on art history, presentation, entrepreneurship and hospitality. They are responsible for programming this space. They also recently unveiled the new name they came up with for this space: MELLY. The name MELLY was inspired by artist Ken Lum's artwork Melly Shum Hates Her Job, a poster commissioned by Witte de With that has been displayed on the building's façade since 1990. Although MELLY does not replace the name Witte de With, the process of naming the exhibition space on the ground floor inspired the ongoing research into the name of our institute.

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Is there one exhibition in particular you can recommend going to?

That's Cecilia Vicuña's retrospective that opens at Witte de With on 26 May and will most likely also travel abroad. And the group exhibition in 2020 on immigration from south to north. For that exhibition, I want to do research in Indonesia, the Philippines, Suriname and some countries in Africa. I think it will be an important exhibition for artists here and in Europe who experience the pressures of immigration. At the same time, this exhibition coincides with the 30th anniversary of Witte de With and marks my 3-year directorship, which I hope will then be extended for another three years.

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Is there anything you want to have achieved in these three years?

Absolutely. I want to reach new, more inclusive audiences and increase and maintain international attention. My mission is to further open up the institute, including locally. I want to develop many activities to engage new audiences. This includes basic tools like advertising, really being present in the city. And I want to set up a programme to enable private donations and memberships of Witte de With. Again, involving the public closely in our activities is very important. I want to be there for everyone who is curious and interested in us. It's about being together, allowing space for conversations and new experiences. This helps the institute to remain autonomous. Artistic autonomy is necessary to keep thinking freely.

Published on 10 January 2019.

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Photos: Florian Braakman