Title: ik snap er niks van oorlog / I don’t understand a thing about war

Type: Textile installation

Materials & technique: (reused) fabric, yarn, (invisible) wooden sticks, paint, buttons / embroidery, sewing, painting (letters)

Size: 2,5 (H) x 2 (W) x 1,5 (D) m (approx. and adjustable)

Installation type: hanging from ceiling, black backdrop could hang on curtain rails in front of a window, it could also be the middle piece between two curtains of dark colour (if not black as well). 

Year of creation: 2023

Story / concept: Images from war zones that reach us via television and other broadcasting media, have this characteristic: Things hang in an amorphic manner, their form is shattered or unfinished and their purpose has vanished. Earlier years, back in the 70’s in Greece, it was more the radio that conveyed the horror of war, and that was done through the announcements for missing persons by the Greek Red Cross. There was a regular timeslot of 5 or 10 minutes, every Sunday after the afternoon news, dedicated to these announcements. A nurse (I imagined then) was taking the microphone and in a detached voice would go through the list of names of the missing and of those looking for them, places, and dates, ending each announcement with the phrase “Since then her/his traces have been missing”. As a child, I could feel the horror of separation, but that was as much as I could grasp from the reality of war. I knew no one looking for a missing relative, nor could I place in time the historic moments that the mentioned places and dates were referring to. It was an abstraction, and yet a horrific one, received as an  unconscious advert against war. These announcements have stayed in the memory of those who grew up with the radio on as a cult radio moment. 

The textile installation “ik snap er niks van oorlog” aims to convey this absence after the destruction: people are missing, costumes are torn, buildings are shattered, and we, the distant spectators, just don’t get it. 

The installation is part of the project ‘ik-snap-er-niks-van’ (a Dutch expression meaning ‘I don’t understand a thing’ or ‘I don’t get it’) that came to life at the end of 2017 initially in the form of a web shop. In the design, the concept sentence is given in Greek letters and also entails the head of an astronaut. The design plays with the notion of identity, the communication between people, and the philosophical idea that what we can really know is that we know nothing. The project ik-snap-er-niks-van entails presentations that expand on its form and meaning. The project was included in the Dutch magazine for artistic research DeFKa Research SC in 2022 (nr. 05).