The performance
- Exhibition
- 's-Hertogenbosch (NL)
- October 2026
- In collaboration with BHIC
Van Klankkast tot Loket was a performative lecture and listening session at BHIC in 's-Hertogenbosch on 15 October 2026, concluding my Charles W. Manders Fellowship.
I opened at a small lamp with the poem Redenen genoeg (Reasons enough) and read my diary fragments there too. I spoke the rest of the text from the table, alternating with seven animations and the sound compositions from the radio archives. In this way the lecture moved from the sounding board, what women organised themselves in the 1970s and 1980s, to the service counter of today.
At the end I asked the audience to write down what they had experienced themselves, or knew from people around them, of violence against women. The forms went into an archive box that is now kept closed at BHIC.
Photography: Joris Vens.
DIARY, 23 MARCH 2026
Today was my first day of research at BHIC. I listened to radio fragments for about four hours. Again and again special moments came by that showed how much women achieved in the 1970s and 1980s.
One fragment was a recording of a demonstration at a courthouse. Inside, a trial was going on against a man who had killed his wife with an axe. She had stayed at the women’s shelter De Tunnel. Now women from De Tunnel were demonstrating outside.
One of them took the floor. She protested against the line of the defence, which argued that the man had been overwhelmed by his emotions at that moment and was in a psychotic state, because of everything he had been through, because of the migration to the Netherlands. According to her, this was a process that had been going on for much longer. This woman had been abused for years. Violence against women is only taken seriously when it ends in murder.
I was impressed by how the murder of one woman could lead to such a well-coordinated protest.
DIARY, 31 AUGUST 2026
Yesterday my boyfriend came back from a walk with our neighbour’s boy Kers. Kers had told him about a documentary series on NPO, the Dutch public broadcaster: Door de ogen van vrouwen (Through the eyes of women). The first episode was about violence against women. Enthusiastically he asked whether I wanted to watch it together that evening.
I had been working on violence against women all week, because I am preparing my presentation. I didn’t really feel like spending my Sunday evening on it as well. But of course I couldn’t skip that documentary. Maybe it contained new information. And I was glad my boyfriend suggested it. Men may concern themselves with this subject too.
The documentary was interesting. It did focus very much on everything women had to endure, and too little on what they organised against it.
At some point two women appeared on screen, Jennifer and Denise. They told how their father had killed their mother with an axe. And that they heard the women’s movement protesting outside the courtroom.
Suddenly I understood that this was the same woman I had come across on my first day of research, in a fragment of the women’s radio. I felt caught out. I had seen her only as an occasion. Only now, through the eyes of her daughters, could I see her.
SOURCES
diary 23 March
Vrouwenradio Den Bosch (BHIC, access 2158), inv. nos. 24 and 67 (8 April 1982)
diary 31 August
Andere Tijden presenteert: Door vrouwenogen, episode 1 (NPO 2, 2026)
