Stroom Promise: the results

Stroom celebrates her 30th anniversary with Stroom Promise, a temporary subsidy scheme for projects that respond to social urgencies as a result of the Coronavirus crisis. Artists, curators, critics, publicists, artist initiatives, collectives, collaborative partnerships could apply until July 1, 2020. Stroom is impressed by the number an dthe quality of the submitted projects. On this page you find an overview of the supported projects.

LIST SUPPORTED PROJECTS

Collective Works (Karin Mientjes)
1.5 pattern (2020 - edition)

The virus will stay with us for a while - that's what people say, as we slowly but steadily re-enter our changing society. The most striking change is that our public space is filled with plexiglass, lines, signs and arrows. Observing these fleeting and informal interventions, Collective Works wants to look ahead. Are we getting used to the 'new normal' (think of the ballet movements performed by people trying to avoid each other while shopping in a supermarket, look at the uncomfortable greeting rituals when meeting friends and acquaintances). Maybe other formal systems and solutions are possible? With 1.5 pattern Karin Mientjes of Collective Works wants to develop a system of visual patterns that questions and researches the infrastructure of social distancing. To this end, trials are being developed, documented and refined. An overview of the new insights will become available later this year via:
https://collectiveworks.nl

Jiajia Qi

There is no there there
When the coronavirus outbreak was first identified in Wuhan, China, it immediately heightened anti-Asian hatred around the world. The Asian community went from being invisible to being hyper-visible, and as potential carriers of the virus. Each person's own limited scope leads to ignorance, bigotry, and arrogance - and ultimately, consciously or unconsciously, prejudice. In this project Jiajia Qi questions how to make people aware of their limitations, by focusing on language systems. She invites four people to participate in this project. They are based in The Hague, but all come from different cultural backgrounds and do not speak Dutch fluently. The purpose is to push participants and audience to the border of the familiar and the unfamiliar. The project will result in an audio installation combining video recording and sculptural elements. On 16 October (20 hrs) there is the open workshop It will shift Again in Billytown (The Hague), around the question: "What if people ‘become alien' to their own languages? They may get the chance to avoid precon-ception". Followed by an exhibition in the spring of 2021.

Bernice Nauta & Self Luminous Society
Ballyhoo Service
The Self Luminous Society, a performance collective and 'alter-ego-artist-run-gallery', will start a series of podcasts entitled Ballyhoo Service, in order to promote a sense of self-reliance in these surreal times. They aim to unite the listeners through stories, songs and mantras. The collective views itself as a gateway to a parallel universe where an alternative logic prevails. Its members all use an alter ego: Benny Snouta (Bernice Nauta), Smart Thinking (David Bernstein), Hayne E. Day (Juan Pablo Plazas), and Jose (Marianne Theunissen). Language (that which is said or concealed) is always central to their working method. Depending on the subject a special guest will join each podcast. Listen to Alien Observer on The Word Radio, the first public outcome of the first episode of the podcast (15 October 2020).

Leyla-Nour de Benouniche & Soeria van den Wijngaard
(Embodied) Transformative Justice for Artists
A workshop series around institutionalized racism and embodied practices of resistance, designed specifically for artists. The workshop will be held seven times at the JTP (Just This Place) studio at the Laan van NOI 125 in The Hague and is spread over seven months. During the 6th workshop two experts on community aid, creative and embodied action are invited. Every workshop will depart from the work of an artist in the field of emergent strategy. From there the organizers work towards an educational and open group workshop in which uncomfortable conversations will take place safely. In order to create sustainable change, we need to practice in small groups and tend to mind, body and community. The personal is political and what is more personal than healing? The hosts of the workshop series Growing Pains workshops are Leyla-Nour Benouniche and Soeria van den Wijngaard. Both are members of Just This Place.
The workshops start on 8 October 2020 (there is space for 8 external participants).
More info: see facebook event

Stichting Modulus
Arbitrary Failures
Arbitrary Failures is a video work written in 2018 by Stephanie Pan from Stichting Modulus about the freedom that comes through anonymity, the freedom of not being observed, of being invisible. These notions are often associated with neglect, and in turn with isolation and loneliness. While this is certainly true in part, Arbitrary Failures offers a counterpoint to that perspective. The piece explores this strange sense of freedom, a freedom that is both lonely and empty but truly liberating in its absence of witnesses. The current pandemic has inspired her to revisit this piece, and to create a larger work around this strange freedom in the context of our shared isolation. With the support of the Stroom Promise a new HD hybrid CGI video artwork is created, based on a new arrangement. It is a collective project initiated by Stephanie Pan, working together with Danijel Mihajlovic (Madhouse Heaven) and Ensemble Klang, to be made entirely from a distance and in isolation. Arbitrary Failures had its premiere in 19 September as part of the Rewire Festival. >> watch the film here

Maarten de Kroon
Out of Focus
Out of Focus is a documentary by Maarten de Kroon and focuses on the corona crisis in The Hague. The big question is: how do visual artists, musicians and other creatives deal with the consequences of the pandemic. Museums and theaters closed their doors, life came to a virtual standstill and continued online. How do artists like Philip Akkerman, Nishiko, Charlotte van Winden, Yuri Veerman, Anne Fehres and Esther Hovers or the musicians of the Orkest van de 18de Eeuw handle this new situation? The film also follows the choreographer Sol Léon and his artistic partner Paul Lightfoot, writer Christiaan Weijts and the dancers Poernima Gobardhan and Alice Godfrey.
The film will have its premiere on 12 September during the Roots Film Festival in Filmhuis Den Haag.

Inge van Mill
The Turning point (Het kantelpunt) 2020
The corona crisis erupted and was accompanied by a high degree of uncertainty and fear. The world economy came to a standstill. Society's focus usually is on endless growth, but nowadays the world economy is hit hard. Our everyday environment looks different: arrows, ribbons, screens and face masks; our reality is alienating, almost surrealistic. It seems as if we have woken up on another planet. Is our humanity still intact, or is it all about the survival of the fittest? Inge van Mill invited two dancers to express these questions and emotions at four different theme locations. Dancers are the ideal metaphor for human behavior and, like no other, are able to communicate this through bodily expressions. From 23 to 31 August 2020 the project will be visible through art films and art photographs in outdoor advertising display cases in the center of The Hague. During the launch on 23 August (12.00-15.00 hrs) Bas van der Kurk (BAS) and Whitney Selina gave performances on the various locations. Another version of the project was shown in Rotterdam in June this year.
More info & map: ingevanmill.nl

Yeon Sung
The Masks Cyclopaedia
Masked crowds on busy streets have been portrayed as the face of the pandemic, becoming images of urban landscapes all over the world. Face masks have been prevalent in East Asian cities for many years already, but since the middle of the pandemic, they also became compulsory on Dutch public transport. In addition they also represented agents for social change during the recent Black Lives Matter protests. Being a South Korean practitioner based in the Netherlands, Yeon Sung has critically investigated the 'Face Mask Phenomenon' since the pandemic outbreak. With The Masks Cyclopaedia she aims to navigate a visual typology of face masks to draw a collective portrait not only of face masks but also of political epidemiology. The results of this artistic research project are presented in October in the form of an online interactive cyclopaedia.

Preview: www.themaskscyclopaedia.com

Guy Livingston
UNDER/CITY/SOUND: The Hague in time of quarantine
A city is connected by roads, trams, cars, electricity and internet cables; but also by sounds, which ignore borders, and echo from one street to another, from one neighborhood to another. And that sonic landscape completely altered under Covid-19. First there was disbelief, shock, fear. Then there was a period of getting used to it: the city was beautiful, quiet, calm. And now life very very slowly begins to get back to something else, and there's a danger that we are already forgetting that feeling of peace, like mercury: precious and evanescent. The five-episode sound-art podcast UNDER/CITY/SOUND brings together people with different backgrounds from all over The Hague to share their listening experiences under quarantine: "cinema for the ears".

The podcasts (12 minutes each) are spaced one week apart, and the series starts July 31 in Dutch and in English >> listen here. They will also me streamed during the Kaliningrad Sound Art Festival in November >> read more (Russian only).

Jong Utopisch Feestje (J.U.F.)
Jong Utopisch Feestje (J.U.F.) is an initiative of the artists Manouk Hasebos and Sara Pape García. They have joined forces as art and nature teachers for children aged 4 to 12. They want to inspire the children they meet while cruising the canals of The Hague by boat in August 2020. They want to inspire them and give the children a set of ideas to work with, in order to shape their own future. They will listen, see and feel what is going on along and on the canals of The Hague. Their means of transportation is a floating laboratory. There are also three stops along the way, locations where educational and interactive activities will take place. The ideas of children can be very inspirational for adults because their imagination has no limit. Through the eyes of children the two artists want to introduce utopian thinking, light-hearted, free and flexible. "Utopian views can create new stories and new stories are what we need in this day and age."

jongutopischfeestje.wordpress.com

Leonardo Scarin
Fragments VR
Fragments VR is an interdisciplinary collaboration of dance, sound and digital art, exploring the aesthetics of virtual presence by means of innovative technology. The uncertainty in the promise of a physical presence within the context of social distancing has distorted our perception of tangibility, by limiting us to means of digital communication. The project recovers a corporeal intimacy that is stuck in between two worlds, one of sensorial reality and 1.5 meters of distance, and one of data streaming and close interconnection. In Fragments VR, the viewer enters a series of 3D scanned landscapes designed to host the volumetric recordings of a dance choreography. Here, the viewers can walk around and experience the performance from multiple perspectives. This not only generates a new unique aesthetic, but it also creates an emotional connection between the audience, the performers, and the digital architecture. Fragments VR can soon be experienced on multiple platforms - online and offline. Go to: leoscarin.com

Milene van Arendonk
Copy Koffie
On March 16, the unthinkable, the impossible happened. With immediate effect, all the catering establishments had to close their doors. No more 'cuppa Joe's' were served in the "coffee shacks" in The Hague, no more meatball sandwiches were eaten and world problems were no longer discussed and solved. Eleven weeks later the doors of the "coffee shacks" opened again. But how does that work in a wooden shed of six by six meters? Milene van Arendonk shows - in word and image - the extent to which life in the coffee shacks has changed compared to before the crisis, how creative the coffee shack owners are and how they and their customers adapt themselves to the imposed rules. The result is a small magazine with amazing stories from The Hague, which will be published in July. Milene van Arendonk: "In addition, I hope to connect people by helping them out of their isolation and into the coffee shack where loneliness is only a word."

www.photosbymilene.com

Sarah Carlier

HOOVM - Haags Organisch Openlucht Volks Museum
What drives man into the woods? Does he use the forest only as a playground, or is there more to it? This question is central to The Hague's Organic Open Air People's Museum. Visitors are invited to see the rough woodlands, shrubs, branches and trees as an exhibition space. Anonymous artists have brought together works that are subject to constant change. The museum did not need to close its doors because of the Covid-19 pandemic. On the contrary: there were more visitors than ever before. Several new works have recently been added to the rich collection. During a guided tour, Sarah Carlier, founder and self-proclaimed curator of the museum, will tell you more about the background and collection of this new museum, which is situated in the Haagse Bos.
The guided tours are no longer available.

Justin Bennett
The Constellation series 2
The Constellation is an audio-fiction series about the future, presented as weekly podcast with text, sound, music and archival material. Justin Bennett has been developing short stories about fictional characters for quite some time now. Some of the characters already exist online under a pseudonym. The stories move back and forth between the present and the 1980s. Geographically, we move between The Hague, Brussels, Sheffield, Madrid and Morocco. In addition to the corona crisis and the personal lives of the characters, the podcasts deal with topics such as the art world, popular music, banking, politics, an evangelical church, the arms industry and the abuse of power. The first series of The Constellation is already online; the second series of podcasts will be available this autumn.
www.soundscaper.com/the_constellation

Andrius Arutiunian
Four Essays
The Covid-19 virus has transformed the landscape of how we function as a global society, but it also adheres to the same neo-liberal forces that govern our everyday lives. Andrius Arutiunian will make an online sound essay in four chapters, which responds to the modes of politicized listening specifically in the current post-virus climate. Each sound chapter is based on a different newly commissioned text, written by Marianna Maruyama, Monika Kalinauskaite, Raimundas Malašauskas and Andrius Arutiunian. The essays will take various sonic events of 2020 as their starting points - glitchy phone calls on Zoom, clapping-for-the-healthcare-workers initiatives, lonely DJ sets on Facebook, the reported increase of 'chill', 'instrumental' and 'relaxing' playlists on Spotify. The sound works will be published in the fall on a newly created website, and will allow its users to read the texts while browsing through the different soundtracks.
andriusarutiunian.com
soundcloud.com/andrius-arutiunian

Mind The Generations Foundation
First Noble institute
The Mind The Generations Foundation offers opportunities to artists and creatives to develop their talents and thus improve their position in society. This spring they planned to organize a series of physical courses and workshops in the Koorenhuis dedicated to the First Noble Institute project, workshops and master classes for artists and creative makers who want to learn more about graphic design, video art, photography, visual art and multimedia. Thanks to the financial support of the Stroom Promise grant, they can now develop a digital platform to realize these workshops in the autumn. The works produced will be exhibited online in the first week of November. The workshops are about storyboarding and comics, photography/composition, storytelling, concept art, 3D design with Blender/Maya and video art.

Annastate / West (collaboration)

Rites of Passage
The present situation was totally unimaginable just a few months ago, and shows both an unprecedented rise of state control over the public sphere and an inspiring example of what can be achieved if humanity is united in a common cause. The global lockdown is a rite of passage of sorts - our society is at the crossroads of perhaps more compassionate times, and as people spend more time with themselves and their families, it also means a certain intensification of experience, which could bring about a change in the outlook and values. To celebrate this transition and offer some mirroring, Annastate residents will issue a video broadcasting series combining video and performance art and reading from works of the Lithuanian writer Raimundas Malašauskas.

Anna Moreno
Will our lost fervour make a comeback?
The film Will our lost fervour make a comeback? addresses the idea of ‘catastrophic affect'; a fascination with the apocalypse, often related to climate change, at other times fantasizing about zombies, floods, and of course, pandemics. In this case it centers around typical Covid-19 conditions like self-isolation, telecommuting and social distancing. The film is the final contribution to Anna Moreno's The Hague Trilogy, which tells the story of a group of people in three chronological moments after an apocalypse. Part 3 (the title is taken from a quote by Chinese writer and curator Hu Fang from his sci-fi book Dear Navigator (2014), focuses on a conflict between two groups and starts with the discovery of an abandoned building.
Watch on Vimeo:
Trilogy Part 1: Ce Sera Toujours à Recommencer (It will always begin again)
Trilogy Part 2: There will be no wondrous solution
The release of Trilogy Part 3 is expected by the end of 2020.

WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get)
All In This Together
All In This Together (AITT) is an initiative that offers an alternative and communal online movie-going experience. Instead of using the conventional (streaming) platforms they create the special environment in which the audience can watch the films on their website www.allinthistogether.online. They playfully explore alternatives for (film)makers whose work exist in-between contemporary art and cinema. With this initiative, they invite visitors not only to reflect on how we look at film today, but also on the importance of "being together"; a theme that is of the greatest importance during and after this strange period, both in and outside the cultural sector. Want to stay informed about their editions? Subscribe to their newsletter.
AITT is an initiative of cinema platform WYSIWYG and artist-run studio buurmen.

Rob Knijn
painpub
In this still unexplored 'new' society, can physical printed matter still offer a good alternative to the ubiquitous online presence of painting? Rob Knijn thinks so and is launching a series of black and white publications. The booklets will be published in small numbered editions of 250 copies; partly sent free of charge to interested professionals, partly sold via a basic website. A simple multiple of the artist in question, printed and numbered, will accompany each publication. The booklets are without text. The publication of the first edition will also be the launch of a publishing house; painpub, a fusion of painting and publishing. The first booklet will be published this summer.

Deborah Cameron
DeeDee Talks X Mental Health
A 10-part talkshow series in which Deborah Cameron (Power Queen from the Schilderswijk, social cultural entrepreneur, community builder with a.o. DeeDee's Kids) talks to various people from the cultural world about our mental health during this corona crisis. Deborah Cameron: "With this talkshow I hope to contribute to the healing of our community and give them hope and strength to face the future with a strong mental state of mind." From 7 June until 9 August every Sunday at 19 hrs there will be a new episode via ByDeeDee facebook live (see schedule on the right).

Yvette Teeuwen
Window project
A 1.5 cm proximity experience within the 1.5 m distance society!
A social art project by Yvette Teeuwen in collaboration with visual anthropologist Sterre Herstel and various artists including Casper Verborg and Lisanne Hoogerwerf. The project will start at the end of June and will a.o. link artists to the elderly in isolation in nursing homes. The artist on the outside of a window makes a drawing and the older person follows and draws directly from the inside, with only 1.5 cm glass-transparent distance between them. Thus making contact, connecting, and creating a ‘double work of art'. View preview during Hoogtij on 29 May.

Anne Fehres and Luke Conroy
Solidarity Sky
A virtual community driven artwork by Anne Fehres and Luke Conroy with the aim of bringing people together through sharing personal images of the sky. People of all ages are invited to become the artists in this project, contributing their own ‘piece of sky' that will join a larger ‘virtual sky' made up of thousands of images from across the world. People are able to submit their images through the project's webpage and social media pages.

Stichting Grafische Werkplaats
Burenpost
A project by the Grafische Werkplaats in collaboration with Huis van Gedichten. During five weeks ten artists and poets from The Hague will make 2500 postcards for 2500 isolated citizens of The Hague. The cards will be distributed through community organizers.
Participating artists: Melle de Boer, Marie Civikov, John Wei Liang Hoek, Jonas Raps, Cyrill Rafael Vasilyev (thanks to Trixie and Annastate).
Participating poets: Siela Ardjosemito-Jethoe, Karen de Boer, Anne Büdgen, Jos Nargy and Umit Colgecen.
Card design: Lula Valletta

Topp & Dubio
Topp & Dubio in a street
The artist duo Topp & Dubio uses the empty city of The Hague as their exhibition space. By showing themselves on the street 24/7, they respond to the restrictions in our freedom of movement. Their photo series Topp & Dubio in a street can be seen in the displays at some 40 tram stops in The Hague for a period of several weeks.

Lennarts & De Bruijn
Stay Sane, Stay Safe
A project by Studio Lennarts & De Bruijn to support all of our medical staff and caretakers while remaining safely inside and to take this pandemic seriously. A call to designers to design posters and to the public to distribute them. The response has been overwhelming. At the end of June they were at 2097 contributions from 86 countries.

Collective Works (Karin Mientjes)
More information will follow soon.

Sean Cornelisse
More information will follow soon.