(c) photo: Daisy van Knotsenburg

For the Dordrechts Museum we created a tailor-made opening with eighteen dancers and acrobats. For two years, dozens of volunteers, led by artist Edward Clydesdale Thomson, worked on a 15-foot wooden tjalk. Where in the city's founding legend boats were dragged a short distance overland from one river to the other, this tjalk was now pulled through the streets of the city, to fall apart (in a controlled manner) in the narrow streets. The debris will be cast in bronze and placed back along the route.

When it turned out that the boat was not allowed to break through the wall of the museum, we were asked to make a symbolic start to the journey, in which the bodies of the performers conquered the wall together.

“Beautiful acrobatic victory of obstacle, border and fence, spectacular to the eye and moving to the heart, as a metaphor for the life journey and the actuality of migrants encountering borders. On to the ship, the blackened tjalk on the other side of the fence.” Wilma Suto

The project will continue. A bronze cast will also be made of a few acrobats that conquer the fence, which will be on display in the Dordrechts Museum!