The Crow Messengers

Judith Westerveld received a grant to develop a new project called The Crow Messengers, which is based on stories told in the South African San languages |xam and !xun that are part of the Bleek and Lloyd Archives compiled between 1870 and 1880. Her aim is to unlock stories from the archive that speak of Dutch colonialism in South Africa. To this end, she selected ten stories that detail how people perceived and met the Dutch colonists. They present a rare perspective on Dutch colonialism in South Africa, told in the narrators' own words and in their own language. The series of artworks consists of a film and photographs, works on paper, a performance, a sculpture and an artist's publication. Through images, text and sound, Westerveld will make the selected stories visible and audible outside their archival form and make them accessible to a diverse audience in the Netherlands and abroad.

Judith grew up in South Africa and the Netherlands and studied Fine Art at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, followed by the Master Artistic Research at the University of Amsterdam. The central theme of her art practice is the socio-political impact of the colonial past on the present, especially in relation to the history of the Netherlands and South Africa. Working multidisciplinary, she uses films, audiovisual installations, photo collages, drawings and performance-based work to make visible and audible perspectives that are missing, erased and silenced. Language, as well as memory, oral history and archival material, are recurring elements that shape her work.