On Being Elsewhere

What happens in a space that isn’t observed? And who may sense a space? I approach these themes of subjectivity, immateriality and special awareness with digital animation, by which I create empty spaces. These spaces function as both actors and backdrops in short films. The spaces in my films are surrounded by domestic sounds from another room; footsteps, clattering cutlery slamming doors and a piano being played. In this way an environment develops that isn’t shown. My fascination with this way of perceiving was formed by my Dutch-Indonesian background and the uncertainty I felt as a child about my identity: hidden stories, intergenerational trauma and a generation that rather not talks about the dark past.

The references come from ‘nothing’, and refer to ‘nothing’, just as in the immateriality of the rooms I build by 3D-animation. I use the properties of film and 3D-animation to create a world that a visitor can wander around in, in a kind of ‘interspace’, between knowing and not-knowing. I am guided by cinematic properties like time, space, light and montage and by the sensory observations of the visitor and myself.

I regard my artistic practice as a method to examine and expand, in my own personal way, the space that has always been uncertain to me. These attempts form an ongoing dialogue between me and the work itself: a continuous process that allows me to create, and to deconstruct, to subsequently create again from that deconstruction, whether or not in a different medium from the original. To exhaust the image, to exhaust the moment.

Geertje Brandenburg (1998) is a Dutch artist who works with installations, sculpture and text. Working with different media, and with an introspective, and sometimes artisanal precision, Geertje surveys how identity is formed by the stories and silent mysteries that lie behind names, objects and places that exist only in memory.

The interweaving of people, i.e. visitors, and objects serves as the basis for Geertje’s artistic practice. She examines how identity is formed by what we carry with us -inherited or found- and how the self is mirrored as time goes by. Her works question whether we can recognize ourselves in an old photograph, a handwritten note, or in a relic of someone we’ve never known. By following these echoes, Geertje explores whether identity is ever singular, or just the sum of the lives and stories that surround us.

I am a visual artist with interdisciplinary inclinations, working across visual, spatial, and written forms. When I approach a medium, I am drawn not only to what it is

supposed to be, but also to its edges, to what happens when its conventions are tested, displaced, or made to speak in another language. I think of my works as

hybrid forms, shaped by literature, cinema, theatre, and other narrative structures. My background is in photo­graphy, with earlier studies in film theory and the

performing arts. If photography taught me to attend to the presence of reality, cinema and writing opened a way of thinking through narrative as trace, a hint of a larger story that can only be partially recovered. Much of my work explores the relation between memory, space, and imagination, and the ways in which history persists as a haunting force within the present. I am drawn to archival and found material as unstable evidence to be revisited,

translated, and reimagined. Through moving image, CGI, and text, I often use speculative gestures to approach what can no longer be grasped directly. I am interested in the poetry of what remains: in residues, echoes, and fragments, and in the social and political undertones they continue to carry.