The starting point of the Sonneveld House exhibition Basics by Gijs Bakker and K. Schippers is the difference between observing a piece of jewellery and a poem. As an observer looking at an item of jewellery, you soon adopt a loaded way of seeing: Would you want to wear it? What is it worth? With a poem, you often see the letters on paper first as a whole, passing a judgment after reading it. What jewellery and poetry have in common is the ability to convey a message in a compact form.
By capturing his own perceptions in words, K. Schippers turns every reader into a ‘viewer’, able to share in his discoveries about reality no matter where they are. A villa like Sonneveld House is a place where people have lived. Now that it has become a museum house, all that vibrancy is, as it were, ‘solidified activity’. In this special context, the alternation of looking and reading becomes an open question to the visitor, asking for fresh connections and insights – new ‘basics’.
The different themes and concepts that play a role in the exhibition are reloaded by the circumstances of the moment, such as observation from a distance and up close, and the traces that (social) activities seem to leave in our experience of spaces and objects.