Henriette Siemons
Discarded
Bio
I am a Dutch-Italian research based visual artist living in Rotterdam. Within my practice I mainly focus on reframing stories using a mixture of archival material, text, and photography.
The themes I work with are forgotten stories, the collective memory and collective assumptions, mysteries, female figures, fairy tales, family, identity, and wonders of nature. All the projects are strongly connected with personal questions, related to the topic in the story.
Most importantly to creating a new story around these topics, is to research and collect different materials and information in various forms. By eventually interacting with the found footage, the outcome often results in a multi-disciplined, poetic new storyline or a different perspective on a topic than is used in the past. I take much inspiration from the child gaze, (children’s) books, fairy tales, family photo albums, animated movies, female figures and classical paintings. With my work I want to show the other sides of historic events, people, animals, entities, natural structures and objects that might have been misunderstood or underestimated. I want to show how important small things or beings can be and reframe stigmatised stories using the collective memory as a starting point. Therefore the result ca function as not only informative but also reinstates a childlike wander in the viewer. It is my aim to replace our judgemental view by curiosity and questions.
