As curator of collective learning she has her focus on divers ways of education and visualization of arts & culture. Within this function she created programs where the connection between people is encouraged and where the cross over between disciplines is the main goal. She ran the annual education program CLIP (collective learning in Practice), where a group of young professionals worked at the institution for six months, contributing on institutional change. By practicing collective learning, this institution opens up to also learn from its programs and audience.
Rotterdam, 2018- 2025
HOME: AN UNFINISHED PROJECT
“If the body is a home, who is our neighborhood?” This question was the starting point to develop Home: An Unfinished Project, a performance-based exhibition by the participants of the Collective Learning in Practice (CLIP) edition in 2022. Home: An Unfinished Project is a motion reimagining gridded neighborhoods into dynamic rhizomes; reinventing familiar structures; creating different colored roots that support community development; encountering tensions, ideas of freedom, and the many different paces of others; of touching rough edges; of making connections.
A “live” exhibition, Home: An Unfinished Project opened to the public on 8 April, with new movements performed and physical elements added, removed, or transformed over two weeks. Staged in the second-floor galleries of Kunstinstituut Melly, the exhibition follows a choreographic score of movements and play. The project aims to foster reconnection; of being still while moving; as well as to express an array of feelings, from being pushed in-between things; of being pulled away from things; and of being eager to find air, roots, and balance. Read the curatorial statement on this page, below.
Home: An Unfinished Project is a project of the fourth annual edition of CLIP, a six-month work/study program for youth and emerging professionals in Rotterdam. Begun in 2018, the participants of this program have been crucial in Kunstinstituut Melly’s transformation, from inspiring its name change to developing new programming activities. Ten participants are enrolled in this year’s edition of CLIP: Alma Zijderveldt, Bianca Casaburi, Elisa De La Serna Gallego, Je-Anne Dirksz, Lara Silva Santos, Lola den Dunnen, Repelsteeltje, Seré, Simon Mensger, and Yoshi So.
These ten CLIP participants organized Home: An Unfinished Project under the guidance of Amsterdam-based artist and choreographer Karina Villafan and Kunstinstituut Melly’s curator of collective learning, Jessy Koeiman. Besides conceptualizing and performing the exhibition’s score, they have also commissioned the exhibition’s set design to Ludmila Rodrigues, sound/music to Hyunji Jung, and costumes to Eduardo Leon from Avoidstreet. Working closely with them as the producer of this live exhibition is Rotterdam artist Pilar Mata Dupont and this editions documentary is made by Emilia Tapprest from nvisible.
CLIP: THE WORK LEARN PROGRAM
A group of young emerging professionals from Rotterdam aged between 17-24 work on a six month based program where they will work in Melly every week and learn how to be involved in cultural institutional decision-making to increase the institutional top-down mentality.
The first edition of CLIP, 2018-2019 focused on identity, which resulted in renaming FKA Witte de With’s ground-floor gallery space to MELLY. Where the second edition, 2019-2020, focused on cultural policy and the third, 2020-2021, on the new corporate identity of the institution after the name change. The fourth edition, 2022 focussed on the body and the placements of bodies within the fields of (contemporary) art. The fifth edition (2023) will be about oral histories and filmmaking and the sixth (2024-2025) will be done by previous participants who will use their earlier learnings to create CLIPS future curriculum.
THE NAME CHANGE INITIATIVE: MELLY TV
During 2018 and 2021 Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art founded itself in a name change discussion where, after an open letter, talks and many comments the new name would be presented. As part of the name change initiative, we launched Melly TV, three episodes with talk-shows, neighborhood guests, and commissioned art projects. These are presented in partnership with Open Rotterdam and developed with consulting partners Lilith Magazine and Brand New Guys as part of the official name launch of Kunstinstituut Melly. This program is conceived by Jessy Koeiman and Vivian Ziherl.
THE COOL PROJECT
The revisit of a social project that took place in 1991 by artists John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres. All the participants of this 1991 project were located and asked to revisit this project once more in 2018 by sharing their memories and stories next to portraying for the same photographer as in 1991.
Please see the video of Open Rotterdam, where she is speaking with Ed de Meijer, Mario Boeyen and John Ahearn here:
