The year before I graduated from the art academy, I took a sabbatical. I felt as if my academy years were passing by too quickly and I wanted to develop other areas of myself before I graduated. So I took a full-time job in a totally different field to finance a four month trip to Asia. That’s when I started my visual diary that became the herald of my graduation project one year later.

About the book
‘Het Verhaal van een Kast’ (‘The Story of a Cabinet’) is about a day in the past on which I had to move a cabinet from the first to second floor of my mothers apartment in Amsterdam. Typical of Amsterdam’s narrow buildings, the cabinet was too big to fit through the staircase inside the apartment. So we were forced to use nothing but manpower to lift it through the window on the second floor. I asked three of my friends to help us.
We used a rope, or didn’t we? We took the entire window out of its frame because just opening it wasn’t enough, or didn’t we? We had lunch together, or was there no food at all? My mother was wearing short sleeves, or was the weather too cold and grey for that? It was a day in July, or was it November? I was there, or wasn’t I? And the cabinet was 11.5 foot tall, or was it 5.5 foot tall?

For the book I made an illustrated report of the interviews I took from the people who helped us move the cabinet that day. It illustrates my fascination for memories and how everyone creates their own history by reliving one situation over and over again in their mind. Not one account of that day was the same!