www.hansovervliet.com
curiositas@zeelandnet.nl
Colmar in the Alsace has almost become a place of pilgrimage for my wife Willy and me. The magnificent and at the same time terrifying Issenheim altarpiece by Mathis Gothart Nithart Grünewald in Museum Unterlinden and the library of the Dominicans of Colmar, located, of course, at the place des Martyrs de la Résistance, are the two main attractions.
Located in the (unfortunately) modernized museum, the library covers some 400,000 documents, including 1,200 manuscripts - 400 of them medieval from the great abbeys of Upper Alsace - 2,300 incunabula and more than 10,000 16th century books.
I write “unfortunately” because the core of the library, the books and folios from just-after-medieval times used to be
just-after-medieval times used to be visible directly through a trellis without the intervention of tempered glass.
The reason why this part, the late medieval, of the library fascinates me so much is that at some point in 15th century, with its 400 books and folios, it comprised the total library of humanist thought. The idea that if you visited and perused the library of the Dominicans in say 1574, you knew of the entire thinking in the Western world regarding humanism is a crushing thought in these days of the infinite Internet.
Willy and I are now, in 2024, pretty much on our last, fourth library. The three that preceded it were, for the most part, donated to now nonexistent second-hand
What these libraries had in commonapart from our common passion for the object, the physical book - was their incompleteness; each of our libraries just covered a fraction of the World Library.
This led me to the idea of compiling a library of my physical behavior from the first of January 1999 until the first of January 2000. For this purpose I noted down every economic action, expressed in the numbers of payed amounts, postal codes, telephone and road numbers, bank and cash register codes, times, toll roads, number of miles for long trips, etc.
I placed those numbers in a grid, each element of which is the size of a passport photo from the passport photo machine that stood at the Leiden train station in the late 1950s.
As a child I thought that in that booth, after a four flashes, a miracle happened every time. It made people stepping out of the booth in pairs always very happy. nated to now nonexistent second-hand bookstores. This fourth library, too, will soon be dismantled.
These blocks with numbers ended up in a grid. I printed them on transparant sheets, mounted those sheets in hardwooden trays, sized A4, and placed them on various iron cabinet shelves. I forced these to rust by painting them with acid.
Thus a library was created of my behavior, expressed in verifiable numbers. Meta- and megadata that today countless big companies ‘harvest’. Harvests that are “marketed” for huge sums of money without the people providing the data knowing about it. Let alone being paid for it as Shoshana Zuboff1 shows us.
While Bruce Schneier teaches us how we have become the product, where, in error, we think we are the consumer2 .
So all those number-passport pictures indicate what I was doing. What I felt, thought, or did not do next to all those actions, this library does not mention. In this sense it is not a library of the Dominicans of Colmar, not a complete library, but a
but a glimpse into the reality of 1999: that of incompleteness and and imperfection.
I fear that what I assumed at the start of this artwork, which was essentially my motivation for making it, namely that sooner or later we would end up in Zuboff's sphere, has now, twentyfive years later, largely became true.
Except that the data harvested by big corporate have vastly narrowed the gaps between “doing” and “experiencing”.
Middelburg, May 2024, hans overvliet
1 The Age of Surveillance Capitalism 2018 | Shoshana Zuboff
2 Data and Goliath | 2015 | Bruce Schneier
the work revitalized | studio setup
work 1999 / 2024
10 rusted iron cabinet shelves, xx hardwood trays, size A4 each filled with four sheets with my activities in 1999, expressed in numbers
tanks to Marie Verboven | curator Geert Verbeke | facilities
preparation for the winter exhibition November 11, 2024 – May 2025 in Verbeke Foundation | KemzekeBelgium
exhibition in the context of BrugesBelgium Cultural Capital | April – May 2002
Hof de Gros - St. Jacobsstraat
curator Jan Verhaeghe / Cultuurcentrum Brugge
Bruges European Capital of Culture | 2002 | BrugesBelgium
thanks to Jan Verhaeghe | curator - Group Planning | facilities work 21 rusted iron cabinet shelves, 30 hardwood trays, filled with A4-sheets with my activities in 1999, expressed in numbers
Trechter 5 | 2002 | Goes
thanks to Ronald van Dokkum ( † 2008) | curator work 21 rusted iron cabinet shelves, 30 hardwood trays, filled with A4-sheets with my activities in 1999, expressed in numbers
De Overslag | 2003 | Tongelre
thanks to Mark Niessen | curator - Hein Verwer - facilities
Rien Balkenende - Rivus II | pianist - Douwe Eisenga composer of Rivus II de Hamernoot / Middelburg - grand piano
work Gothic 'window' of 27 hardwood trays, filled with A4-sheets with my activities in 1999, expressed in numbers
Verbeke Foundation | 2024 - 2025 | KemzekeBelgium
thanks to Marie Verboven | curator - Geert Verbeke | facilities work 10 rusted iron cabinet shelves, 27 hardwood trays, filled with A4-sheets with my activities in 1999, expressed in numbers
Parts of the work are included in a number of (private) collections.
