Screening of Maurits Script and Maurits Film followed by talk with artist Wendelien van Oldenborgh (Netherlands) and Suely Rolnik (Brazil. Psychoanalyst, Researcher and Curator).

Maurits Script, 2006
Video. 67´

Eight participants read and discuss fragments from, among other things, the letters of Johan Maurits van Nassau, governor of a Dutch colony in northeast Brazil between 1637 and 1644. The entire film is recorded live in the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague.

Johan Maurits has a reputation of being an enlightened ruler, who commissioned scientists and artists to study the new colonies, including the painter Albert Eckhout, whose life-size representations of the local population have become well known.
The story of the 17th century Dutch colony is about a community made up of different groups with conflicting interests who have to live together. The script, composed of reports from the Dutch West India Company, chronicles of a Portuguese friar and letters from Johan Maurits, forms a complex image of a society full of paradoxes and conflicts. The film touches on the legacy of colonial history. In the discussions that this provokes between participants and with the public, the topicality of this rather neglected period in Dutch history comes to the surface.

Maurits Script is a part of A Certain Brazilianness. In this series of works, the roles of the participants are continually changing (director, actor, personage, audience) as a reference to a revision of fixed social positions and patrons.


Maurits Film, 2008
HD Video. 45'

With Daniel Breda, Paulo Bruscky, Edson Fly and Caranguejo Uçá, Alexandro Silva de Jesus, Dirk Meewis (Netherlands Bussiness Support Office Recife), Barbara Wagner, Eliane Rodrigues and Associação de Mulheres de Nazaré da Mata.

The diptych of Maurits Script and Maurits Film focus on the contemporary multicultural society with its different wishes and desires. In Maurits Script (2006), reports by the Dutch West India Company from the seventeenth century Brazilian Recife are read aloud by a group of Dutch citizens. In Maurits Film a number of Brazilians from the present-day Recife get up to speak.

Seven individuals or groups from the present-day Recife each represent one of the historical figures in Maurits Script. Thus, the Fluxus artist Paulo Bruscky is linked to Zacharias Wagener,
assistant at the court of Johan Maurits; members of the pressure group
Caranguejo Uçá of the Ilha de Deus – a fishing community in Recife – recite a poem about their political struggle, the chief representative of the Netherlands Business Support Office Recife is filmed during a telephone conversation with a client, and in Nazaré da Mata, a small city in the sugarproducing regions around Recife, a female Maracatú group perform the musical ritual, originally only open to men, which begins with fragments from the minutes of the Political
Councils of the 17th century. The period of Dutch rule is often idealized in Brazil. The stories about Johan Maurits van Nassau (known
in Brazil as Maurício de Nassau) are part of the collective memory, whereby the current relationship between the prosperous Europe and its former colonies also plays a role. Maurits Film is the fourth and last part of A Certain Brazilianness.