Next week during Amsterdam Art Week, the artists of the Rijksakademie will share their work, recent discoveries, research, and art-making practices with the public. Ahead of Open Studios, I spent the day on the Sarphatistraat in the former Kavallerie-Kazerne turned artistic rabbit-warren with some of the resident artists.
A vine creeps through a slightly-ajar window in Silvia Gatti’s studio, tracing its way around the window ledge and across the white wall. When she first moved into the studio space at the Rijksakademie, she tells me, it was tapping on her window, seemingly asking to be invited in. Outside, the soft plip-plop of raindrops is the barely audible punctuation in the background of the other louder sounds I’m hearing reflected off the silver metal scattered around the floor. It’s as if being in an echo chamber, hearing rain sounds and blood flowing. Gatti works with AI, prompting it using broken language and using multichannel sounds to explore dreams as states of place. The code contains a dream narrative and at one point, there is a bug that breaks it. The heartbeat keeps the listener present, but the fragility is felt.
Fragility isn’t unfamiliar to Krystel Geerts, who is elsewhere within the Rijksakademie working with a new ceramic technique—piping it in incredibly delicate and overlapping structures, sometimes fences, sometimes lace-like formations. It’s a departure from her previous large-scale, heavy work that took the form of sturdy architectural forms and an exploration of the versatility of the medium.
In an upstairs corner of the Rijksakademie, a window was broken in Jort van der Laan’s studio space, but the artist has left the resulting glass debris as-is. Now, the shattered glass serves as a permanent installation piece, ever present and dialoguing with his recent work with stilts. Jessica Wilson is also finding inspiration in the often-overlooked, as she repurposes old taxi tops from New York City cabs and programs them for video using computer-generated animations. A lone taxi top is now mounted on her studio wall.
Meanwhile, in Nora Aurrekoetxea Etxebarria’s studio, the holes in the artist’s floor have prompted an inquiry into how we regard hollow spaces and all the marks we are asked to cover. She’s now considering the hole as something that has no right to exist outside of its role to be filled. The result is a studio floor dotted in silver, which she’s poured to bring attention to these would-be imperfections. The molds of the interior shapes of the holes made sculptural, make the invisible, visible and line the studio’s windowsills along with an impressive amount of reading material. She is not the only artist drawing from literary inspiration: Ada Maricia Patterson’s hauntingly tragic headless woman, is largely inspired by ‘Wide Sargasso Sea,’ a novel written in 1966 by Dominican-British author Jean Rhys. In a silky blue sky, is the figure falling or flying? Take a look inside the walls of the Rijksakademie during open studios and see for yourself…
2025 Open Studios at the Rijksakademie takes place 22nd – 25th May
Tickets available via the Rijksakedemie. Please note there are no ticket sales at the door.?
Opening Hours:? Thursday, 22nd May 12.00 – 19.00?, Friday, 23rd May 12.00 – 21.00?, Saturday, 24th – Sunday, 25 May 12.00 – 19.00?
