Het wapen van de redelijkheid

Robin van den Maagdenberg received a grant to develop Het wapen van de redelijkheid: an interdisciplinary project about her experiences as an artist-in-residence in a psychiatric institution where her grandmother stayed in the 1970s. There she discovered the importance of a pen and paper to give words to her fears and sorrows, and not to disappear herself in a story in which it was inevitable that, because of her family history, something similar would also happen to her. She discovered at the same time that throughout history women were denied the right to write about their admissions, they were not given a pen, which was seen as the weapon of reason. To still give voice to their emotions, women embroidered their texts into their hospital gowns or wrote with blood or soot. She wants to visualize the history of all those smothered words in a visual way with this work.

Robin is a writer and journalist. Her debut Thuis is waar we beginnen was published by Querido in April 2022. She has previously written articles for NRC Handelsblad, Vrij Nederland, See all this, Openhouse Magazine and The Preserve Journal.