Of the Departure and the Arrival
Of the Departure and the Arrival
This project began with collecting everyday objects used and discarded in Delft [1]. This detritus was sampled and sorted as if to suggest some sort of a contemporary archeology of the city’s waste. The objects were duly catalogued and crated before their departure to China. They were shipped to Jingdezhen (historically a city that could be considered a Chinese equivalent of Delft) – where they were skillfully copied in porcelain. The transformed Delft objects were then shipped back to the Netherlands.
Upon their arrival in Delft, the objects were arranged as a massive phalanx in the main hold of a ship moored near the old VOC [2] headquarters. This scene evokes a powerful sense of the past, as if a cargo of valuable oriental goods had just arrived from the Golden Age by time rather than sea travel. Documents, photographs, video and sound installations were displayed on the bridge and in various spaces throughout the ship. Selected objects were also displayed in Stedelijk Museum Het Prinsenhof among original archeological objects from Delft.
The transformation undergone by the objects in China and their return to Delft is a process that both refers to the porcelain trade - the practice of Chine de Commande and VOC economic-politics of the 17th century, and also to the global production and outsourcing of contemporary goods Made in China. Thus what had departed as a gathering of quasi-ethnological objects, the used junk of Delft, returned as ‘beautified foreign goods’, reified contemporary antiques. The project fuses the past with the present, proposing a historical moment as a contemporary fiction, or in reverse, historicizing contemporary life within a phantasmagorical reappearance from the past.
1. Delft is a small Dutch city whose name became a generic term used to describe European pottery that attempted to imitate Chinese blue and white porcelain.
2. The VOC was the Dutch East India Company.
