Remanence Installation 
2024
Film projection loop, letter on display and translation booklet, audio piece with projected translation.
DESCRIPTION
In this exhibition, Groenewegen expands her short film Remanence in dialogue with her ghostly collaborators. Combining testimonies from recently discovered oral history and never-before-seen film footage, this short film evokes a lost history of a women’s peace movement in which women worked across social divides towards collective action in the 1930s. The images of the women’s movement are re-framed by oral history testimonies of participants, now elderly, looking back at their efforts – and the course of history – during interviews conducted by feminist researchers in the 1980s. The projection of Remanence features the display of a letter by Henk Hos, the man who filmed the most striking film material re-used in Groenewegen's film. During her research, Groenewegen recovered and saved his short film, hidden in an archive not dedicated to film preservation. Shortly after filming the last women’s peace march of 1939, Hos joined the resistance during WW2. He was arrested and executed.  The night before his death, he wrote a goodbye letter to his friends and partner; one of the women seen in the re-assembled material in Remanence. Groenewegen addresses Henk in a third audio piece projected on the shutters of the bunker, addressing her reuse of the film material he produced in support of the women’s movement.  Interweaving and reactivating different historical strata, Groenewegen produces a narrative of gender politics, resistance, and internationalist struggles against rising fascism.
EXHIBITION
Kunstfort Vijfhuizen | In the vacuum we felt air
Curator: Rabiaâ Benlahbib