Roosje is an artist that uses photography and video as her medium. She aims to show the layers of traditions, stories, situations and locations. She focuses on how all the elements relate tot each other: how one element can be part of another, from which perspective we interpret situations or how we could interpret them. She uses both truth and fiction to tell a story, combining found footage with her own images, video and text. For the last two years she worked around the theme of water and flooding. She read archetypical myths and stories about floods and researched our notions of safety. Roosje visited different places that have been flooded and gathered information through interviews, photography and film. Her interest stems from growing up in the Netherlands, a country below sea level. The Dutch pride themselves in having control over the water, after having experienced floods for centuries. In her work Roosje used water as a signifier on how mankind is divided, between privileged and underprivileged. This shows the difference between having the means to escape from or even control water or having to deal with a life-threatening situation. Privileges become visible when looking at the difference between using water for recreational purposes, while others are crossing it in order to flee from a dangerous situation.
I will work for the next step in my process: a research into the transformational effect of flooding on our environment and our experiences. Up until now, I have reflected water and flooding, at the moment of its appearance, as a violent movement and its ability to draw physical and social borders. I will now look into the aftermath of flooding, to study flooding as a force that takes from and changes a land and a community forever. I’m going to research how water transforms material and reconfigures landscapes and I will assess how ‘watery’ landscapes reframe familiarity, and challenge traditional and conventional experience of place. I will my conduct my research with interviews and photography (both my own photographs as photographs or clips that I will ‘borrow’ from the community), so that I can create an archive as a basis for my research. I will study the subject of flooding, drawing upon cultural and social interpretations of home and domesticity, of materiality and of landscape. As a next step I will work with sculpture, so that I can make an installation that allows me to experiment with water and material, materialising my thoughts, doubts and questions within my research.
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Roosje Verschoor lives and works in Amsterdam in the Netherland. Before going to the Gerrit Rietveld Academy to study photography, she studied Dutch linguistics and Culture at the University of Amsterdam. After graduating from the photography department at the Rietveld, her work was shown in countries like Surinam, Puerto Rico, the US, Canada, Bulgaria, Italy, Finland, Spain, England and Germany.