26 november: Letter to a Silk Road

datum
24 October 2022

De presentatie van de publicatie Letter to a Silk Road bij Framer Framed in Amsterdam vond plaats in het kader van de tentoonstelling For those who have no time to play van Gluklya (Natalia Pershina-Yakimanskaya). Met Fabienne Rachmadiev, Malika Umarova en Sandra Rottenberg. 

The publication of A letter to a Silk Road is a work book, an experiment, a start of a collaboration. It came about after artistic research in Kyrgyzstan in 2019. Marjolijn Boterenbrood was part of an international team of botanists looking at the rich biodiversity of this republic. She studied the connections of this country, that is situated in the heart of the old silk roads along which silk and other products, animals, seeds, religions, ideas but also deadly diseases travel.

On the maps of an old Soviet atlas of Kyrgyzstan she drew images of her own experiences in the Netherlands and the encounters with the people of the Kyrgyzstan Republic during the study tour. This is the core of the publication. It is not an end product, it is also an invitation to artists and artist collectives to think about an alternative silk road, an alternative Eurasia connection. It is an open work, others can run off with it, a means of transport, an intermediate step, an invitation to react, to stat a dialogue, a collaboration. 

A letter to a Silk Road consists of a letter to the artists of the Kyrgyzstan Republic, a text section of curator Binna Choi, 18 prints of the drawings made in the atlas and the stories that are at the basis of this. Accompanying the workbook are two articles. One by art historian and curator RenĂ©e Borgonjen that introduces my work as a process of deep mapping. Another is by artist, geographer, curator and researcher Nikolay Smirnov, which elaborates on a genealogy of geography rooted in the mental construct.