Nederlands

The Disintegration Loops (for Euterpestraat)

William Basinski, Radio Filharmonisch Orkest, presented by ANOHNI

Free

Associate artist ANOHNI lived on Gerrit van der Veenstraat for a year in the late 1970s. As a young child, she and her family were unaware of the dark WWII history of the neighborhood. ANOHNI has now initiated a ceremonial project addressing the layers of memories contained on the street. The event centers an orchestral performance of William Basinski’s contemplative masterpiece The Disintegration Loops.

A mixed and vital community that included many Jewish residents, Euterpestraat was transformed in 1942 when the Nazis established their SD intelligence headquarters in the building that is currently the Gerrit van der Veen College secondary school. Across the street, the Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung organized the deportation of tens of thousands of Jewish people in a building where the St. Ignatiusgymnasium currently stands. Anne Frank and her family were among those who were detained there before being sent to concentration camps. After the war, Amsterdam’s officials hastened to ease the stain of fear upon the neighborhood by changing the street’s name in honor of a Dutch resistance fighter Gerrit van der Veen.

Associate artist ANOHNI lived on Gerrit van der Veenstraat for a year in the late 1970s. As a young child, she and her family were unaware of the dark WWII history of the neighborhood. ANOHNI has now initiated a ceremonial project addressing the layers of memories contained on the street. The event centers an orchestral performance of William Basinski’s contemplative masterpiece The Disintegration Loops.

A mixed and vital community that included many Jewish residents, Euterpestraat was transformed in 1942 when the Nazis established their SD intelligence headquarters in the building that is currently the Gerrit van der Veen College secondary school. Across the street, the Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung organized the deportation of tens of thousands of Jewish people in a building where the St. Ignatiusgymnasium currently stands. Anne Frank and her family were among those who were detained there before being sent to concentration camps. After the war, Amsterdam’s officials hastened to ease the stain of fear upon the neighborhood by changing the street’s name in honor of a Dutch resistance fighter Gerrit van der Veen.

ANOHNI and ambient composer William Basinski have been collaborators since they first met in NYC in the early 1990s. William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops has become culturally associated with the commemoration of 9/11. With an orchestral score by Maxim Moston, ANOHNI has invited Basinski to present a unique staging of this work as a prayer for local lives and memories of those erased by the Holocaust, and by the allied bombing of Euterpestraat. The program is offered also as a window in which to consider the nature of the peace in which ANOHNI found herself playing as a 7 year old on Gerrit van der Veenstraat, thirty years later.

Stories and events related directly and indirectly to this history are shared in this afternoon programme, and a choir of students from two secondary schools located on this street will also present their arrangements of two songs by ANOHNI.

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dates

Sun June 18 4:00 PM

Prices

  • free entry € 0

language & duration

  • Language no problem

  • 1 hour 40 minutes (zonder pauze)

ANOHNI:

‘I lived on Gerrit van der Veenstraat for one year in the late 1970s as a 7 year old child, and my English family was ignorant to the events of thirty years previous. Astonishingly, we never questioned the story behind the Mezuzah embedded in the wall by our front door. To me as a child, the neighborhood was a place of refuge and creativity; it was the site where my imagination first unfurled. Euterpe, a Greek muse of music and lyricism, delivered her gentle promise to me. I played, unaware, in the street where a few decades earlier the Frank family themselves had been contained, awaiting deportation, at the Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung.

 

I was shocked to finally learn the terrible history of Euterpestraat. During WWII, the former girls' HBS across the street from my home had been converted into the headquarters of the Dutch section of the German Sicherheitsdienst (SD). On the internet, I saw black and white images of SS flags casting shadows over my childhood dream.

ANOHNI:

‘I lived on Gerrit van der Veenstraat for one year in the late 1970s as a 7 year old child, and my English family was ignorant to the events of thirty years previous. Astonishingly, we never questioned the story behind the Mezuzah embedded in the wall by our front door. To me as a child, the neighborhood was a place of refuge and creativity; it was the site where my imagination first unfurled. Euterpe, a Greek muse of music and lyricism, delivered her gentle promise to me. I played, unaware, in the street where a few decades earlier the Frank family themselves had been contained, awaiting deportation, at the Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung.

 

I was shocked to finally learn the terrible history of Euterpestraat. During WWII, the former girls' HBS across the street from my home had been converted into the headquarters of the Dutch section of the German Sicherheitsdienst (SD). On the internet, I saw black and white images of SS flags casting shadows over my childhood dream.

Gerrit van der Veen was an artist and a Dutch resistance fighter. By changing the name of the street after the war, city officials contextualized the neighborhood as a site of a heroism. While the resistance fighters were indeed valiant, many other Dutch people actively supported or fearfully turned a blind eye to the removal of their Jewish neighbors rather than risk their lives to try and prevent it.

Around the world, children often find themselves playing in anonymous chasms of genocide in which their environments were previously purged of their original inhabitants, and of their biodiversity, before a sense of “peace” resumed. The necessity of forgetting is central to the success of extractive, late-stage capitalism. In order to keep consuming, we cannot be derailed by the resonance of truths and histories embodied within the materials and spaces in which we bathe.

The teachers at Gerrit van der Veen College have developed a curriculum that addresses the situation in which they find themselves, instructing diverse, artistic teenagers within walls that housed extreme human cruelty. Discussing the ways that the history professors face this challenge was intensely moving to me. Those teachers and students are the heroes of Gerrit van der Veenstraat now, working by themselves to excavate and tend to the memories within the building with such dignity.

I would like to create a window where the memories of Euterpestraat, Her beauty, Her kindness, and Her collapse, have time to breathe for the broader city, as a gift to Amsterdam. It is because of my tremendous love for this neighborhood, and my gratitude for the way She held me as a child, that I wish to honor Euterpestraat now, with greater insight into Her Truth.’

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  • Anohni, Associate Artist Holland Festival 2023

    © ANOHNI

credits

concept conceived by ANOHNI music William Basinski composition/arrangements Maxim Moston conductor MaNOj Kamps orchestra Radio Philharmonic Orchestra

This performance is made possible by

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