This year, we want to celebrate imagination; invite you to travel to a different world through the works on display. A gigantic ball of wool, for instance, or a wave of ice lollies, moving flowers, a bamboo blaze, an upside-down waterfall, etc.
Still, I can imagine some people say “I don’t mind travelling to another world – as long as it’s real. Not stuff that has been made up.” That basically limits you to a ticket to the Moon, or Mars. Expensive and time-consuming. Or you could simply jump in the water. Although I wouldn’t recommend it, not here and now at least, it’s still an easy way to enter a completely different realm. A world full of weird and wonderful creatures. Where we can’t breathe, while they’re in their element. Where you can move over someone without having to jump. Where you can’t take a shower, since you’re already under water. Where thirst is a truly alien concept.
As part of an education project, students at Amsterdam’s Breitner Academy have brought a corner of this underwater world to the surface, in the artwork To Merge. It stars crayfish, in a range of different colours. Animals that are so different to us that you wouldn’t even know how to cuddle them. Or to check whether they’re happy or sad. If you want to enter a different world – right here on our own planet – all you have to do is dive in.
Fun fact
“Let’s stay curious: take time to reflect on, wonder about and enjoy things that perhaps we shouldn’t be taking for granted!” says artist and inventor Eibert Draisma. Draisma supported Breitner students Priya Saktoe, Yoeki de Ruyter and Sorella Loman in this education project. We for one wholeheartedly agree with him – do you?
