Pope.L’s new video installation was commissioned by De Appel and shot during the summer of 2022. The work is a continuation of a series of projects (video, sculpture, performance) that have premiered across Europe in the past half decade and that reconfigure the largely symbolic discourses surrounding processes of historical reckoning into an acerbic repertoire at once tightly managed and out of control. In Amsterdam, referred to in the video as “the city of amnesiacs,” Pope.L depicts historical memory as an identifiable set of objects and intimations (like a badge, or a mark, or a one-liner) that can be won or lost.
Shown on a single large screen in an otherwise bare exhibition space, the twenty-minute video takes the form of a quiz show called Saamhorigheid (a cheekily cumbersome word, translated from Dutch as “Togetherness”) filmed in a black-box studio accented by minimal fluorescent stage markings and on the tourist-clogged main drag of Amsterdam. A group of four contestants is maneuvered by a hammy, overwrought host (wearing blackface resembling a commedia dell’arte mask) through three rounds of tasks intended to excoriate the amnesia afflicting “Dutchland.” Here, remembering is a competitive, harried process that resembles sifting through “pocket junk”—fragments with inconsequential or inconsistent value—while also resurrecting the sounds, slurs, and songs that make up the racist (and still current) lexicon of the Netherlands.
The game show is an ideal theatrical format for Pope.L. Its combination of stagecraft and cut-from-real-life antics produces a torsion that ultimately shreds the rules of the game—some contestants are encouraged to cheat while others lapse into reverie or confront the host. Things keep slipping out of line, even if they’re planned that way.
— Annie Goodner
