At a time when facts are increasingly framed as fantasy, and fiction is often presented as truth, F for Fact aims to develop narratives for the present by looking at past and future representations of reality through an artistic lens.
At this School of Second Thoughts we investigate the nature of knowledge as we perceive, document and share it. Through social and natural history, archives, fundamental science, literature and popular media we explore physical and intellectual knowledge kept in the vaults of our collective memory.
F for Fact connects the individual artistic practice to knowledge produced and stored at various institutions and collections, mostly situated in The Netherlands. The program supports in-depth collaborations with a selection of renowned knowledge institutes and archives related to art, science and society.
F for Fact translates what we think we know, what we have forgotten and what we can imagine into an elegant attempt to observe, question and describe the world from a personal perspective.
Works can be articulated in any medium of choice: film, audio, speech, writing, drawing, performance, tool, object. The question is how to translate different forms of knowledge into new forms of storytelling.
The program consists of lectures and interactions with international guests from the edges of art and science and excursions to unexpected places, where participants and mentors share their experiences on an equal basis.
Truth has always been stranger than fiction.
It still is.
Snow crystals, photographed by W.A Bentley around 1900
André Malraux, Le Musée Imaginaire, Psychologie de l’art
Each work of art contains a potential for dialogue, this potential being proportional to the works' chances of surviving the passage of time. This dialogue occurs between the work and its observer, and also between the works themselves– this being a corollary of museums, imaginary or not. By the juxtaposition of artistic figures in the montages of his books of art, Malraux’s only aim is to test this potential.(Jaqueline Machabéïs, André Malraux, Across Boundaries)
Microscopic image of a pollen sample.
To zoom in is a way to understand the world beyond our default perception. The microscope is a Dutch invention, even though Holland itself is a country so small one needs a magnifying glass in order to find it on the world map.
Debris reconstruction of Columbia Space Shuttle, 2003
Mission STS-107 was the 113th Space Shuttle launch. Planned to begin on January 11, 2001, the mission was delayed 18 times and eventually launched on January 16, 2003, following STS-113. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board determined that this delay had nothing to do with the catastrophic failure.
The primary colors of the grid are unintentionally festive, and it’s hard not to think of De Stijl, as we cannot block knowledge we already possess. Such a referential thought can be called professional deformation, yet in the face of tragedy, abstraction may actually be a comfort. Reconstruction requires knowledge, memory, imagining of material possibilities. How to make sense of the missing?
Introduction days at Kunstfort Vijfhuizen, September 17 and 18, 2020
Introduction days at Kunstfort Vijfhuizen, September 17 and 18, 2020
Architecture by Jurgen Bey
Introduction days at Teylers Museum, Haarlem, September 17 and 18, 2020
The participants are: Eloïse Alliguié, Elki Boerdam, Mariana Fernandez Mora, Jonathan Hielkema, Pia Jaques de Dixmude, Anouk van Klaveren, Olga Korsun, Puck Kroon, Furqat Palvan–Zade, Juliana Zepka
Sandberg Institute Open Day 2020
Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, glass sea creatures
Location Slotervaart Hospital
We have started the master program physically in 2020, even during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, in the former Slotervaart Hospital in Amsterdam New West.
