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This publication documents the first part of The Familiar, developed during a residency at De Vindplaats in Amsterdam in 2025.

 

Working together with children aged 6–12, the project explored ideas of home, familiarity and belonging through conversations, collective making, building, drawings, sound and light culminating in the installation The Big House.

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I am currently a guest artist at residency GinDS (https://ginds.org/) from April to July 2026:

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On April 1, I began a residency at GinDS, located in a former bunker. Here, I continue The Familiar, an artistic investigation into how the sense of “home” emerges and shifts. I depart from the idea of the familiar: that which seems known, but can never be fully fixed, and becomes tangible precisely through its shifts, and at times, its turning points.

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The first chapter of The Familiar developed through a collective process with children. Through conversations, drawings, and shared constructions, we explored what “home” can be: a place, a memory, a language, or a group of people. When one of the children suddenly moved away, his absence became immediately perceptible. What was missing began to shape what remained, and emptiness functioned as a kind of shadow against which everything else took on form.

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In this second chapter, I work in isolation. The bunker does not function as a backdrop, but as a research instrument: a space in which absence is already embedded in the material itself, and where the unknown takes precedence over the familiar. Time slows down, withdraws, and at times seems to come to a standstill. The absence of daylight and the enclosed structure demand a different mode of perception, in which presence reveals itself precisely through what is missing.

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In this context, I explore how a place gradually becomes one’s own through being there, remaining, and looking.

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This research is supported by the AFK (Amsterdam Fund for the Arts).

© 2024 by David Wasch. All rights reserved.

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