La Sobremesa, 2022
When, in 2022, Stedelijk Museum Breda and Witte Rook invited me to take up a residency in Breda on the basis of an award (from the KLEIO Foundation), this resulted in “La Sobremesa”, an anthropological-artistic investigation into the paper napkin, a fixture in Spanish dining culture. Every café in Spain has a napkin holder with napkins that are just too small to wipe your hands on, and the words “thank you for your visit” printed on them. I had noticed that napkins are hardly ever used in the Netherlands. Napkins are a very minor aspect of a food culture, but one that is bursting with cultural significance. They are both specific and ubiquitous. But since the COVID pandemic, the napkin holder has been quietly disappearing. Now more than ever, I feel the need to celebrate and immortalise this everyday object through my work. The project culminated in an installation, a spatial assemblage in which the various components entered into a relationship with each other and invited Dutch visitors to reflect on their habits and relationship with the napkin.
When, in 2022, Stedelijk Museum Breda and Witte Rook invited me to take up a residency in Breda on the basis of an award (from the KLEIO Foundation), this resulted in “La Sobremesa”, an anthropological-artistic investigation into the paper napkin, a fixture in Spanish dining culture. Every café in Spain has a napkin holder with napkins that are just too small to wipe your hands on, and the words “thank you for your visit” printed on them. I had noticed that napkins are hardly ever used in the Netherlands. Napkins are a very minor aspect of a food culture, but one that is bursting with cultural significance. They are both specific and ubiquitous. But since the COVID pandemic, the napkin holder has been quietly disappearing. Now more than ever, I feel the need to celebrate and immortalise this everyday object through my work. The project culminated in an installation, a spatial assemblage in which the various components entered into a relationship with each other and invited Dutch visitors to reflect on their habits and relationship with the napkin.
