INTRODUCTION

An unusual year
This year, the world is turned upside down — so it's not surprising that the judging process for the Steenbergen Stipendium looked different from all previous years. For a long time, the jury wasn't even sure if they could see the final exam works. But slowly, invitations from the educational institutions started to come in, and with a few months of delay, they were able to get to work. "It's admirable how most academies and their students managed to still organize impressive presentations, collaborating with local initiatives: HKU with Fotodok in Utrecht, St. Joost with old factory halls in Breda, and Rietveld with Foam in Amsterdam," says Merel Bem.

Bebe Blanco Agterberg (KABK)

A mal tiempo, buena cara / In bad weather, a good face
In 1977, the left and right parties in Spain concluded the Pacto del Olvido (‘Pact of Forgetting’). Their aim was to end the fascist era of Franco and start a new, democratic society. As a result, history was rewritten. Old crimes were obliterated. An alternative reality emerged. Bebe Blanco Agterberg reflects on that period in her project A mal tiempo, buena cara / In bad weather, a good face. In striking black-and-white photographs presented in an installation and in a book, she sketches a society struggling with a past that ceased to exist from one day to the next. How do you shape such a society? What memories replace the erased ones? And who decides which memories should disappear and which ones should stay? In a natural way and with attention to proportions, Agterberg combines Spanish archive photos with her own work, which alternately has both a staged and a documentary, classic in character.

Nathan van Ewijk (HKU)

A Room Within
Of all nominated works, Nathan van Ewijk’s film makes the strongest reference to quarantine and the endless staying indoors that we have experienced in 2020. At the same time, A Room Within transcends that theme – the film is part of a young oeuvre that is already still and meticulous on its own, and purposefully registers the wondrous within the everyday. Van Ewijk placed a video camera in front of the window of his house and the view from it: a house, a tree, the sky with clouds. It could hardly get any simpler. With an incredible focus on detail, he captured what happens when the day slowly fades into the evening, when the window is open and the wind picks up, when a fly walks on the glass, and the sounds from outside seep in – no ground-breaking events, but nothing to be missed for those who intend to pursue the life of an observer. Van Ewijk does not follow a complicated storyline; the window is the narrator.
It seems as if he does not steer the viewer in any way, as if he also makes them drift on a bit, but that is an illusion. Van Ewijk does direct the spectator, albeit in a very subtle way. He lets the shot of his window and the installation around it exactly coincide, so that it feels as if you are looking directly outside from the exhibition space. The three yellowish upper windows were also captured in that hyper-realistic, almost painterly way. The whole is illuminated in such a way that the view sometimes feels reminiscent of a scene by Carel Willink: balancing on the edge of real and surrealistic. The entire work of art is a trompe l'oeil – on the one hand misleading you, and on the other hand offering a kind of calming, meditative experience, where the quality of the sound also merits a mention.

Suzanne Schols (KABK)

Polite Fictions – Behind the public face of diplomatic gifts
Polite Fictions is an investigation into the transparency of international political traffic, which, as it turns out, is not transparent at all. Suzanne Schols found in the diplomatic gift – the polite, seemingly trivial, but oh so meaningful ritual gift that is exchanged when the representatives of two countries meet – the perfect symbol for that apparent publicity. When she wanted to dive into the world of diplomatic gifts, it turned out that the Dutch government and the European Commission did not want to give her permission to photograph the various objects. There are already lists, and images – sure, but everything is encapsulated with restrictions, rules, and secrecy. So, what now?

Schols decided to tell this story in two different ways, which gradually intertwined and reinforced one another. One way was the factual one: the photographer functions as an investigative journalist who accurately shows what you encounter when you want to portray this subject. She collected every refusal, every negative answer to the question whether she could come and photograph gifts, often with important stamps and signatures. She collected every shred of information about diplomatic donations – press photos (President Trump wearing a personalised Brazil national football team T-shirt, donated by President Bolsonaro), catalogue images, and lists with detailed descriptions.
The other way in which she approached her subject was the fictional one. Her staged, cinematic scenes of carefully wrapped objects – one in bubble wrap, the other in black tissue paper – are tantalising portrayals of the cautious policy on diplomatic gifts. By photographing objects in this exciting, mysterious way, Schols manages to temper the aroused curiosity of the viewer: wrapped and illuminated in this way, the ‘gifts’ are reminiscent of intriguing sculptures, and their content no longer matters.

Ashleigh Wilson (KABK)

The Road to Purgatory
Wilson’s photographic section consists of everyday childhood photos from her personal archive, which she combined with detailed shots of the local government building, symbolically captured on old black and white film rolls that expired in 1998. Her short film is a fragmentary collage of three small, private histories that together tell a larger story about the impossibility of rigorously closing the past. The images are alternately poetic (the green, rainy Irish landscape, the river) and banally mundane, sometimes almost inferior (a woman at a gas station, filmed from the backseat; shaky, covert images of a funeral home that appear to have been made with a cell phone). The whole has a slow, photographic quality. The voice-over is enchanting. The intriguing text is Wilson’s forte, perhaps even more important than her images.

Wilson’s photographic section consists of everyday childhood photos from her personal archive, which she combined with detailed shots of the local government building, symbolically captured on old black and white film rolls that expired in 1998. Her short film is a fragmentary collage of three small, private histories that together tell a larger story about the impossibility of rigorously closing the past. The images are alternately poetic (the green, rainy Irish landscape, the river) and banally mundane, sometimes almost inferior (a woman at a gas station, filmed from the backseat; shaky, covert images of a funeral home that appear to have been made with a cell phone). The whole has a slow, photographic quality. The voice-over is enchanting. The intriguing text is Wilson’s forte, perhaps even more important than her images.

Pippilotta Yerna (KABK)

She is the canary in the coalmine of a dying empire
Not everyone would dare to give it a go: staging the death of your very own mother. Not just once, but several times. Still, in her project She is the canary in the coalmine of a dying empire, Pippilotta Yerna manages to do just that. There lies her mother, washed up on the boulders along a river, in a strange position and with wide-open eyes on the floor of an empty room, on the hard concrete of a courtyard, with a head wound and yellow rubber gloves. Her daughter sits on top of the body and captures the gruesome scene with a telephoto lens. What’s going on here?

How do you defuse what you fear most? For Yerna, the answer is clear: with the camera. As evidenced by her multimedia installation, she has a close, symbiotic bond with her mother. The installation is pleasantly tactile and includes those macabre, absurdist images, a publication, a text message conversation, postcards, and a crazy kind of suit with a life-size picture of her mother in her underwear. The mother named her daughter Pippilotta; the now grown-up Pippilotta calls her mother ‘Mamski’. “Could it be possible to die together someday,” the daughter writes in her book – that’s how symbiotic they are.
With her camera, Yerna tries to control, and perhaps influence the inevitable – her mother’s mortality. This resulted in a graduation project that sparkles with individuality and originality. Yerna’s photos are simultaneously playful and serious. They show humour and guts. Additionally, mother and daughter have performed the scenes extremely professionally. Both took the wild plan to photographically construct the mother’s death down to the last detail.