NON SINE PERICULO
Non Sine Periculo (not without danger)
For this edited series we took as a starting point 17th century paintings of wealthy Dutch and other Europeans. The paintings are technically well painted by celebrities such as Rembrandt and Frans Hals, which makes the viewer forget that the characters in these works have amassed their wealth through the destruction and oppression of people, cultures and nature. They represent a system of an elite which thinks it can place itself above others. Who arrogates the right to dehumanize people with a different skin color, culture or religion. A dominant culture that for centuries could do whatever it wanted with people and their bodies and the consequences of which are still felt every day by descendants.
A European dominant culture still represents existential danger for people of color, our soils, nature, animals and the world. The dominant culture that created the system of oppression and exclusion lost its soul long ago. The plants in the works are sacred and have a healing effect.
The birds were drawn by John James Audubon, a 17th century ornithologist, writer and illustrator. To obtain good models, he sometimes shot hundreds of specimens of a particular species to study them and then mounted the best specimens and shaped them with iron wire into the most natural pose possible. They were then used as models for his drawings, pastels and watercolors. A number of birds he immortalized are now indeed extinct
