Andre Reeder and Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Fellows Intensive
Fellows Mitchell Esajas, Grant Watson, and Reem Shilleh, along with BAK, were preparing to co-convene a Fellows Intensive beginning 23 March, 2020. With lockdowns starting in Europe just a week before, the plans became impossible in their imagined forms and the Fellows were unable to gather at BAK, visit The Black Archives in Amsterdam, do tactile workshops, and use that time together to concentrate on ideas archiving and editing. As we are figuring out the ways to be together now, the Fellows met online with guests to think through these topics and address the convening Fellows’ research. The fellows watched Filmmaker and social worker Andre Reeder’s Glad to be gay, toch? (1992) and artist and BAK 2017/2018 Fellow Wendelien van Oldenborgh’s Two Stones (2019), a film which was researched during van Oldenborgh’s time as a Fellow. The two met with the Fellows online to present on the histories of Black and queer activism in the Netherlands and practices of using media and editing to tell stories of social struggles.