Off the Map at De Richel, Amsterdam

More than six year ago, we launched our platform defactoborders.org. To celebrate this occasion, we organised an event and invited some guests and friends. We were delighted to find out we were not the only ones interested in borders and crossovers in art, journalism and science. We decided to organise more of these get togethers, with every time different topics and different guests. After touring The Hague, Vlieland, Deventer, Maastricht and Nijmegen, we found ourselves back for our tenth edition in Amsterdam, in a new location, Theater de Richel. We love theaters that have the audacity to book a program like ours!

De Facto’s own Jorie Horsthuis kicked off the evening with a talk about the Strait of Hormuz, all over the news these days. Jorie once hitchhiked to the Strait of Hormuz, together with her father, did some fence-climbing and noticed lots of informal trade as well.

We asked our audience what kind of border crossing experiences they have and found a wealth of anecdotes. Like the visitor that crossed the border between Mauretania and Western Sahara - a non-recognized territory filled with landmines. Or the visitor who remembered crossing the German-Austrian border with a car and a dead professor. Checkpoint Charlie 1980 (whilst holding Marx’ writings). Crossing the Belgian border for the best fries. And crossing the border between mourning and resignation. Thanks to all visitors who shared their memories with us.

Documentary photographer Rachel Corner was present at the launch of our platform, back in 2018, to talk about Transnistria. This time, she was here to share her latest project, on how trees are used to shift borders in Palestine. If you haven’t listened to “The Promised Forest”, the podcast she made together with Mandula van den Berg, you can check it out here (in Dutch). The photos, made with infrared light, shed an eerie light on a little-known geopolitical weapon that trees can be.

Graphic designer Floor Koomen took the audience to Nutopia, a micronation founded by John Lennon and Yoko Ono. They were interested in the notion of borders, or better said, ‘no borders’. Imagine there are no countries, John sang in ‘Imagine’, a song that was written in collaboration with his wife, he later admitted. Floor zoomed in on Yoko and her work as a musician and artist. Turns out, Yoko was also very much into maps! Together, they shaped the concept of Nutopia, a country without borders that you can become a citizen of just by thinking about it. One other amazing work by Yoko Ono is the assignment ‘Draw a map to get lost’ or the artwork in which people could stamp a map with ‘imagine peace’. It feels more relevant than ever.

Music was provided by Ukrainian Alex Tugushin. He reflected on the invasion of Ukraine and shared his experiences. How has the war changed his life? Alex was born into a Russian speaking family in the Soviet Union in a part that we now know as Ukraine. Later on, he came to the Netherlands to play guitar on the streets and stayed. He now works as a sound engineer for documentaries like Hila beyond the Taliban and Konvooi. He sang for us the song Обiйми, meaning ‘Embrace me’, originally by Okean Elzy to voice his worries about the war in Ukraine but also about what will happen after the fighting stops. Jorie Horsthuis interviewed him about the communities that have been driven apart by war and polarisation, in the whole country as well as in his family. How to continue living together once the borders have been moved and redrawn?

The nerdy quiz by researcher Suzanne Hendriks was met with some feverish enthusiasm/fanaticism and the last candidates had to fight it out in a shootout. The winner took home a Somaliland goodiebag, donated to us by our explorer-to-be Aron Goossens, who had just come back from a trip to Somaliland.

A big thanks to the funds that make our Dutch tour possible: Fund for Special Journalistic Projects (Fonds BJP), Stimuleringsfonds voor de Journalistiek, BNG Cultuurfonds. And also thank you to Milan, our technician of the evening, and other staff at De Richel and also to photographer Hester den Boer, for capturing the vibe of the evening so well.