This week the building that houses the art institutions TENT and the institution that insists on still calling itself Witte de With was defaced in protest to the delay in renaming the latter institution. Six months ago in January of 2020, in two Dutch national newspapers, space and time were given to discuss why the institution - that still insists on calling itself Witte De With Centre for Contemporary Art - is taking so long to change its name. There was an interview with director Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy in De Volkskrant and a column in NRC Handelsblad by Lotfi El Hamidi, and both left me scratching my head in bewilderment.
by Quinsy Gario
To refresh your memory, this institution was named after the Witte de With street that it's on in Rotterdam. This particular street was named in 1871. 1871 was the year that the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of Sumatra was signed in order to update the 1824 treaty between the two colonial empires. In 1810, the British had taken over Sumatra during the Napoleonic occupation of the Dutch empire, and therefore the 1824 treaty came into existence after Britain gave The Netherlands their plundered possessions back after the defeat of Napoleon. That 1824 treaty had, in the 50 years since, become a hindrance to the further economic development of both empires. In the 1871 treaty, Britain ceded control of Sumatra to The Netherlands and The Netherlands gave up its Dutch Gold Coast to the British. That is now part of what was re-named Ghana - just shy of 80 years later - after they fought and gained their independence from Britain in 1957. The 1871 treaty included the negotiation for the transfer of workers from British India to the colony of Suriname to work on the plantations. These so-called indentured workers would replace the formerly enslaved black plantation labourers, now that their additional 10 years of unpaid work – which was demanded to compensate plantation owners for the loss of their “property” - was coming to an end. The signing of this 1871 treaty was also directly responsible for the Aceh War that lasted from 1873 until 1904, and cost hundreds of thousands of lives because the Dutch annexed land as it expanded and tightened its grip on what was renamed Indonesia, after its independence from The Netherlands in 1945.
This short and simplified rundown of the historical moment in time when the street was named is important because, in the discussions about the name of the art institution that still insists on calling itself Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art, this seems to fall by the wayside. In the insistence on the here and now, the harm done in the past – as well as the way it is still reverberating in how we relate to and move about cities like Rotterdam and countries like The Netherlands - is willfully forgotten. There is, of course, a danger to look back in time and pinpoint events and making connections presupposing a direct correlation where there might not be one. However, this street being named after a Dutch naval commander simply can't not be connected to the simultaneous violent annexation of that same region that the naval commander helped to exploit when he served both in the Dutch East India Company and the Dutch West India Company. It can't not be connected to a campaign of nation-building in The Netherlands that was predicated on justifying, celebrating and making opaque the subjugation of people and ecological destruction elsewhere. Moreover, the ignorant adoption of this street name 119 years later, for a contemporary art institution, can't not be connected to the European art world’s inextricable ties to the whitewashing of colonial ecological destruction, resource theft, dehumanization, and violent displacement.
Torpedo gunboat Hr. Ms. Witte de With (1929-1942). Den Helder 1932 | Regional Archive Alkmaar / collection Regional Archive Alkmaar / RAA003012915.
Thus, the headline of the interview with Hernández Chong Cuy, “Kunstcentrum Witte de With zou zijn naam veranderen, maar heet nog steeds Witte de With” (translation: Art centre Witte de Wilde was going to change its name, but is still called Witte de With), seemed to insinuate that the interview would contain a resolve of the slowness of changing the name; that the sole prompt of the interview would be to properly discuss the severity of the situation. However, as you continue to read the interview, it slowly dawns on you that it's actually an interview to promote a talk by Ken Lum. Instead of the interview being about the art practice of Lum and its importance, the journalist tries to figure out what's going on with the name of the institution. On the one hand you can fault the journalist for pushing Lum's work to the sidelines, but on the other hand, you can't because Hernández Chong Cuy is now two-thirds into her first term (of a maximum of two) as director, and came in with the mandate to change the name of the institution. The interview was published on 14 January 2020, while Hernández Chong Cuy became director of the center on the first of January 2018. The board of the institution announced in September 2017 that it would change its name after an open letter was published in June 2017 as a result of the institution’s response to a discussion that was started in February 2017 by writer and cultural critic Egbert Alejandro Martina.
Why have there been, at the time of this publication more than two and half years after the board acquiesced to change the name of the centre, no more public steps taken towards this? What could be more important than to at least symbolically attend to the concerns of those who have been and continue to be harmed by Dutch colonial exploitation? By not celebrating one of the key figures of that horrendous endeavour in the preservation of his name on the facade of the building, their website, their press releases, their letter-head, their social media accounts, their international collaborations, etc.? Why is the powerful reparative pedagogy, inherent within such a gesture of recognition and institutional atonement, not being understood by an art institution that publicly states its residence in a former school informs their institutionality?
In the interview, Hernández Chong Cuy states that she's been implementing a different way of working within the organization behind the scenes. One of the first things she introduced was the founding of a fellowship program for 16 to 23-year-olds. The first cohort was tasked with transforming one of the gallery spaces into a multi-purpose space. For six months, the ground floor gallery space operated under the name “Untitled” to then later be named Melly, referencing Ken Lum's 30-year-old iconic billboard on the side of the building. What is troubling is that the work behind the scenes feels like a stalling tactic for the work that needs to be done concerning public discourse and the public it serves. It's as if the institution is arguing that the harm being done by the institution is first and foremost being done to its employees. As if after pointing out the discrepancy, between the wish to facilitate important decolonial and postcolonial conversations and the moniker under which that is being done, it is the working conditions and administrative structure of the institution that now need to be prioritised over the outward violence that that discrepancy continues and obscures. This strategy is the reiteration of a hierarchy in which the awareness of the colonial violence the institution is wrapping itself in, is now used to better the institution itself before it deals with the harm that it is perpetrating outside itself. In other words, the continued harm done to Black and Asian bodies is now being used to educate a White institution, and that runs counter to the intentions stated by the institution. If the gallery space transformed by the fellows could be named and operated under the moniker “Untitled” for six months, what's keeping the institution from implementing that same strategy for itself as it figures out its next steps?
After the institutional acknowledgment of the colonial violence perpetrated by the figure it is named after, and during the period in which the street was named after him, it seems as if there is no feeling, in the literal term, of what it means to come to grips with what the institution has now been doing for 30 years. The name change seems to institutionally be experienced as if it is simply a superficial exercise of virtue signaling; something that is done to and for the outside, but has no bearing on their bodily experiences of the space. This implies a complete lack of solidarity with those who do sense the horror that is being venerated through its institutional practice of doing critical and insightful work under the banner of Witte de With. This man was a cog in the wheel of the then burgeoning and now anchored systematic and continued practice of capitalist exploitation, human degradation and ecological destruction in the Global South. Why are people being told to wait because the institution is cheekily “staying with the trouble”? It's offensively staying there to the detriment of people other than themselves, and being ignorant of that seems to run counter to what they have stated they want to do. It is an appalling signaling of an inattentiveness and indifference to what it means to be confronted with symbols like these on a daily basis, and experiencing what they signify for your existence when you have a violent colonial link to The Netherlands. Moreover, this also seems to run counter to the stated values of the organisation that employs people who I do hold in high regard.
grave monument of Witte De With in St Laurenskerk, Rotterdam by Josh at Dutch Wikipedia
The rather off-putting interview with Hernández Chong Cuy in De Volkskrant was followed five days later by a rather weird column in NRC Handelsblad by Lotfi El Hamidi on 19 January 2020. I write this as an appreciator of El Hamidi's work while all the while knowing that he's there to counterbalance the racist rubbish that is published in that paper under the banner of platforming a plurality of voices. He's there because he's a good writer, but also to give the paper a semblance of neutrality. When reading columns in national newspapers, it's good to remember that even the most progressive voices have been picked by an editor or editorial board that also picked the racist voices. In that regard, this column then reminded me less of El Hamidi's strongest work and more of another revered NRC columnist & essayist who consistently falsely presents two sides of a struggle as equally powerful and extreme, only to then conclude with an opinion that positions the columnist as a sensible moderate. However, that positioning is a self-unmasking of bad and boring bourgeois politics that nobody should be boasting about having. Said writer is, to my befuddlement, consistently awarded prizes in The Netherlands and has long been surrounding himself with up and coming writers of colour who are now seemingly adopting his politics and style, to the detriment of their own voices and insights seemingly just to fit in with the intellectually dishonest norm. This column by El Hamidi is one of the latest head-scratchingly painful illustrations of the adoption of that type of both-side-ism.
El Hamidi posits that those who call attention to the violence inherent in the name of the art institution are just as bad as the ones who want to keep the name. Mind you, he is saying this as somebody who intimately knows the local context of Rotterdam. This is the city that brought forth the political revolution that is Leefbaar, which espouses racist and Islamophobic policies, and that catapulted the late Pim Fortuyn to national prominence. Fortuyn is the one who ushered in an unrelenting verbal, political, cultural and social attack on Muslims in the country, which has lasted for the past 20 years. Rotterdam is the city in which one alderwoman once proposed to force pregnant Black teenagers of Caribbean descent to have an abortion, and another alderman proposed and implemented a plan to force certain groups of women to take birth control. That alderman went on to become our current national minister of health - Hugo de Jonge. This is the city that first introduced stop-and-frisk in The Netherlands, and two years ago unveiled a plan to strip people of their clothes if they could not provide the receipts of where they bought those clothes when stopped by the police. It's the city where the council of aldermen proposed to demolish 20,000 public housing units and then racists turned around and blamed the lack of affordable housing on asylum seekers. It's the city that has introduced a law that prohibits people from living in certain areas if their incomes are below a certain amount; that law is now being adopted by several other cities throughout the country. This is the city that is majority “minority”, but you wouldn't know that when looking at the overwhelming whiteness of the boards of companies in the city, or those in power at the municipal level. To be clear this is not an attack on the city or its inhabitants. Rotterdam is one of the most exciting and innovative cities in Europe because of its cultural diversity and blue-collar ethos. This short list is, however, a reminder of the fact that despite the people who live there it has a lot of shortcomings that are systemic and structural in nature.
When El Hamidi states that there are two equal sides to the issue regarding the naming of the art institution and the street, he's stating that these sides are equally to blame for the heightened tension. He’s placing the outspoken racists who have been in power and are arguing that everything is being taken away from them on the same scale as the ones who are pointing out how harmful the continued veneration of a colonial figure and that period in time is. Just to be abundantly clear, that’s rubbish and El Hamidi knows this because in other situations he has recognised this false equivalency and called it out in other columns such as this, this and this. Which raises the question, why would he choose to push the narrative of false equivalence in the case of Witte de With, within the little space that he’s been afforded in a national newspaper, as a person of colour in a country that is institutionally hostile towards his existence? There is an absurdly uneven distribution of power along racial lines in this country because of its colonial history, and anybody telling you otherwise is bafflingly not paying attention and exhibiting a troubling unawareness when the situation at hand doesn’t directly relate to their own experiences. Or they’re trying to curry favour in a transparent attempt to belong to the echelon of the powerful. The noted false equivalency in this both-side-ism of the column carries on over when El Hamidi notes that there is no immediate need to decolonise the name of the street and the institution because a diverse public now frequents that neighbourhood and has made it popular. By reiterating that argument just now, the absolute absurdity of publishing this preposterous take in a national newspaper becomes all the more disconcerting. Does El Hamidi really not understand the difference between the need to dismantle violent colonial infrastructure and the presence of people of diverse backgrounds who are forced into navigating that infrastructure for their survival? Those are two entirely different things.
The column also contrasts the glacial pace of the institution’s public reckoning with its name and what it stands for, with the development that the neighbourhood has gone through since the art institution opened its doors there. El Hamidi notes that it's changed significantly for what he deems is the better, and states that those who remember how it was before, remember it as a place that you didn't go to if you didn't have to. What he hints at is that the art institution was able to move into what is now regarded as prime retail estate in 1990, because of the deplorable state of the neighbourhood, and of that street in particular. Without saying it, he is making the connection between art, cultural entrepreneurship and gentrification. What's visible in the street is the arrival of a class of people who relate differently to the systemic neglect, marginalisation and stigmatisation by the local government, and what that does to the upkeep and investment in living conditions. The inclusion of various racial and ethnic backgrounds into that class of people does not erase the capitalist and white supremacist underpinnings of that gentrifying endeavour; this shouldn’t be that difficult to grasp.
Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art defaced in protest.
What the Hernández Chong Cuy interview and El Hamidi’s column fail to do is actually engage with both the historical background of the naming and the open letter that was published calling for the institution to think about what it means for it to espouse critical thinking, as well as engender postcolonial and decolonial thinking while operating under the name of a commander in both the Dutch East India and Dutch West India Company. Both texts shy away from admitting that in the 30-year existence of the institution, there must have been others who voiced their opposition to how the name of the institution was white-washing colonial atrocities; others who were silenced or ignored, or both. What the interview and the column both attest to is how there is now no way to not acknowledge the critique and reparative actions towards the harm of those on the outside of these institutions. Now we get to see how these institutions, and the people giving them ideological cover, attempt to either coopt this push and espouse it as coming from within these institutions, or to normalise and thus obscure through de-politicisation the struggle that led to this moment in time. These are, in turn, tactics that are in full view in both the interview with the art institution’s director and the NRC column, of once again erasing the labour to led to this shift in attitudes and insights.
That these blatant tactics are now so glaringly visible is the result of the work done by the critical mass that has been calling for a reckoning with the normalisation of colonial violence in everyday life in The Netherlands. This work, one in a long line of struggles, has reached another tipping point. It is the continued existence of grassroots organizations and collectives like the European Race & Imagery Foundation that are evidence of this shift in the ways in which institutions in The Netherlands are effectively being held accountable to their stated intentions. This concentration of power that rejects the universalising centre, but comes from a calling for justice has been significant in pushing otherwise static institutions out of their willful ignorance and complacency. The report that this column is a part of is a reminder that we, you, Hernández Chong Cuy, El Hamidi and me, have the capacity to do better. The recent defacement of the building is not something that can be coopted to delay this necessary change. Dragging this out another six months is insulting and using the protest as a badge of honour until that moment strips it of its urgency. And so, this is another call to the institution to do better, to stop dragging its feet and change that awful name already.
A earlier version of this text was published in the 2020 report from the European Race & Imagery Foundation on the presence and prevalence of Blackface imagery which can be found here: Identity crisis as part of a new beginning .
Quinsy Gario is a visual and performance artist from Curaçao and St. Maarten. In 2017 he exhibited in Witte de With as part of the group show Cinema Olanda: Platform.