Silvia Martes
'... has other plans for us'
In the spring of 2027, De Pont Museum will debut four new works by artist and filmmaker Silvia Martes (Eindhoven, 1985) in the exhibition ‘… has other plans for us’. This solo exhibition – her largest to date – is a personal and cinematic exploration of loss and death, how to cope with sorrow, grief and memories, but also of reincarnation and the afterlife.
The idea for the first work in the exhibition emerged in 2024, when Martes went to Curaçao to visit her grandmother with dementia. The artist was deeply moved by the deterioration she saw in the previously strong and enterprising woman. In an attempt to hold on to part of her grandmother, she documented her moments of clarity and confusion. This emotionally confrontational process – exacerbated by a conversation with her mother in the Netherlands about saying goodbye from a distance – prompted her to undertake an intensive exploration of death and mourning.
In the exhibition, Martes links together places and stories from her own past while simultaneously zooming out to examine major cultural differences in how other people deal with the inevitable end of a human life. She interweaves family history and heritage, immigration and the colonial past with her own interest in the incredibly diverse rituals that have arisen around death.
After the film centred on the conversations with her grandmother began to take shape, Martes journeyed to Ghana with her brother Jimmy as her production assistant. This country was the point of departure for many of the enslaved people who were transported to Curaçao and Suriname. There, she began research for the second work in this exhibition, immersing herself in the cosmology of the Ga people and visiting coffin makers in the capital city of Accra. Their imaginative coffins – shaped like chilli peppers, beer bottles, lions, fish and more – help guide the deceased to the ancestral world. The third film is set at Fort Elmina, a former slave fort on the Ghanaian coast, from which Dutch traders shipped the people they had enslaved. The spirits of Marte’s long-ago ancestors seem to haunt the place still. The fourth, fictional film centres on rebirth. Recorded in her Amsterdam studio, it shows the artist manufacturing confrontations with earlier versions of herself.
Martes established her reputation with films in which disorienting narratives unfold in sometimes surreal film sets which are meticulously designed by the artist. Rather than relaying straightforward chronological accounts, she sketches intuitive visual collages of loosely connected and sometimes absurdist scenes. ‘… has other plans for us’ also reflects a new development: in addition to her trademark Martes film sets, she has now adopted a more documentarian method featuring footage she recorded while researching and travelling, with plenty of room for improvisation. For the first time, the new films will be presented in De Pont Museum as spatial installations in combination with works of sculpture.
The works in the exhibition were made possible in part through the support of Hartwig Art Foundation.
