Avantia Damberg (UniArte) in conversation with @Sasha Dees and @Willum Geerts, both art residents in Curacao, Dees at UniArte and Geerts at IBB. Damberg will question them about their work experiences in Curacao as well as their broader experience with international residencies and how residencies could benefit the art field and its professionals in Curacao.
Sasha Dees
Dees is an independent producer, curator and writer in visual art, performing arts, literature and film. She owns a production &management company (1998) workin with artists and art-organizations internationally; producing and programming projects, exchanges and collaborations, scouting talent for venues, festivals and foundations and co-founded, with Philip Powel, the not-for-profit John106 (2003). In 2010 she initiated and curated an international residency for multiple disciplines in Amsterdam, Ailsa
Anastatia participated in, transferred to art collective Vinger in 2014. She has been a resident in the region, and participant in visitor programs of international residencies as Art Omi, Residency Unlimited and NARS in New York. Dees’ currently works on a book mapping the art infrastructure in the region based on her research from November 2017 until May 2019 on 14 (of 17 visited countries in the Caribbean (insular), in part made possible by Mondriaan Fonds, Marguerite de Rooy,
UniArte (Curacao), Nina Jurna (Rio), and Ateliers’89 (Aruba). www.sashadees.com
Willum Geerts
As multidisciplinary artist, Willum Geerts plays through prosaic elements
from the everyday with the major themes of our absurd existence. In a
poetic, associative and satirical way, his projects question the status
quo of our contemporary off- and online world, in which the inevitable and
intricate reality is in intimate entanglement with the world of
entertainment. Within our current world Geerts looks for the moment
between holding on and letting go. That one moment, when exhaustion
strikes, and changes to the situation. Whether the situation is tiresome
or not, it contains an inevitable insecurity: the constant possibility of
change. Geerts is currently living and working in Amsterdam and presents
his multidisciplinary work all around the world, in- and outside the
regular art context. He lectures at the Fine Arts Department at the HKU
University of Arts in Utrecht. Geerts is on the island as the
Mondriaanfonds resident at Instituto Buena Bista (IBB) and has done
multiple artists in residencies from Vietnam to New York and beyond.
www.willumgeerts.nl
Carthagenastraat is a small side lane of Bredestraat, going towards Punda on Bredestraat pass the Botica (right) and after go right into the side lane at the TATOO store. UniArte is the blue building (left) on the corner at the end of the side lane).
