Once Upon A Time In The West

This publication is an exercise between performance and documentary photography.
“As a narrative that takes the format of a video projection and a fotonovela (1), Once upon a time… concentrates on the story of Nieding and Hendrikje Wolters, ex-travellers (2) who became notorious in the North of the Netherlands after publishing a book about their own lives, ranging from criminal convictions to evangelic belief (3). With specific attention to performance and documentary practices, a photographic sequence is enveloped within a conversation that attempts to describe what we are seeing in order to problematize what we are not seeing, being facts and fictions equally subjected to speculation. The work is the result of three moments of production. In the first, I work in collaboration with the Wolters on the construction of photographs that document the staging of specific passages in their biography. In a second moment, discarding the use of talking heads or speech bubbles and avoiding moral impositions (often used in fotonovelas) I invite curator Inti Guerrero to enter into a dialogue about the pictures produced. Using the recorded and transcribed version of this conversation as the textual part of the narrative, the third moment of production is further developed with references to theatre scripts, film stills and newspaper reports to the final form of a video projection and a publication.”

DAI PUBLICATIONS is a collection of artist’s books issued by the Dutch Art Institute (DAI) and designed in collaboration with the Werkplaats Typografie (WT). The 2011 edition consists of 16 publications. In close collaboration with one or more guest authors, artists team up with designers to produce an artwork in the form of printed matter. From very diverse perspectives they reflect on publishing as a versatile medium. DAI and WT, both located in Arnhem are Master’s programs of ArtEZ, one of the major arts universities (Hogeschool voor de Kunsten) in the Netherlands. Gabriëlle Schleijpen , head of program at the DAI, founded DAI PUBLICSATIONS in 2003. It began as an experimental and innnovative research and publishing platform aiming to address the specific process of arts books production, it is now an acclaimed editorial project. Since its inception more then 90 artist books have been published. As of 2006 the series is supervised by an annually appointed collection editor; for 2011, visual artist Rebecca Sakoun.