CREATIVE ARCHIVE
Welcome to the Sites of Memory Creative Archive, a space where you can read background information about the sites, listen to performance text and watch 360 videos. This space allows you to navigate through stories from The Netherlands to South Africa., from past, present and future.
Future for the Past: A journey back in time to explore “hidden” stories from the colonial past. Artists from The Netherlands and South Africa reframe history through music, poetry, dance, visual art and theatre. With this project, Sites of Memory shares insight into how the colonial past plays a role in our present and to reimagine the future.
Wat does freedom mean to you?
PORTUGUESE SYNAGOGUE
This synagogue was inaugurated in 1675, replacing the former synagogue on the Houtgracht (now Waterlooplein), which was in use by this Portuguese Jewish congregation since 1639. Portuguese Jews often worked as merchants and some of them traded in enslaved people, in networks with Christian enslavers. With their arrival in the Dutch Republic some Jewish merchants brought Black men and women with them as 'servants'. Legally, the practice of slavery was prohibited on Dutch soil, but it was not always equally applied or enforced. Many were forced to remain as servants, convert to Judaism and attend the services at the synagogue. Sephardi ladies used to send female servants early to hold their seats in the women's galleries so they could arrive late, a habit which was stopped by the board. Just as the Ashkenazi Jewish servants the 'negras y mulatas' were no longer welcome to arrive early and hold seats at the first four rows.
BURIAL GROUND
In the middle of the seventeenth century there was a Black community living in Amsterdam. The majority of the community lived in the area around the Jodenbreestraat. The 17th century map reveals that there was a city cemetery next to Hortus Botanicus, now still an unmarked lawn. This is the area where hundreds of women, children and men of African, Caribbean and East Indian descent were buried.
HORTUS BOTANICAL
In 1636 the city of Amsterdam established a botanical garden to study and display the seeds and plants that VOC and WIC ships brought to Amsterdam from all over the world. The VOC and WIC stole hundreds of seeds, saplings, and plants from across the world, and brought them back to The Netherlands. The colonisers also took their own seeds, plants, and trees and planted them in the colonized areas. In the Hortus stands the oldest potted plant in the Netherlands, known to the Xhosa people in South Africa as the Breadfruit Tree.
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GARDEN
JEANNIE
I have to learn
To listen
To my grandmother's knowledge
How everything moves
I have to learn
To listen
To the legacy around me
That resonates in my heart, in my dancing feet, in my restless hands
Tn my genes
Because the one
Who could tell
Doesn't tell anymore
I hear you, grandma
In the stones, I hear crying
In buildings, I hear mourning
Whispering in the darkness
Stories that are being shared
Stories that are being told
Stories that are being heard
Undisturbed
sssst….!
Be quiet!
Don't say so much
Listen more
Listen along
Listen to me
Ground
Ground me
Nothing is mine
Ground me
I am grounded here, but a bastard
I put my ear to listen to the ground
Ground me, I belong here
Water try to listen to what I’m saying.
Because I sometimes say something, that I don’t hear myself
JOMECIA
In the name of the wind
The head can think again
In the name of the sun
Find warmth within ourselves
ALL
In the name of borders
Keep finding them
In the name of resistance
We stand up
JOMECIA
Or she stays seated on the bus
To stand for herself and others
For those who were not heard, not seen, but carried
ALL
In the name of transformation
JOMECIA
I continue to immerse myself in the icy water
Until my body can no longer feel
Until I can no longer hear my own thoughts
In the name of listening
In the name of healing
In the name of transformation
And each time, another person is the main character in the story of creation.
Today it’s you, tomorrow it's somebody else.
In the name of listening
In the name of healing
In the name of transformation
​
THE END
