Performing the Archive

Annelieke Holland received a grant for the development of Performing the Archive. In this performance, Annelieke acts as a tape DJ, exploring her mother’s cassette and VHF archives. The cassettes feature recordings of her mother’s piano concerts, a conversation between her mother and a fortune teller when she was Annelieke’s age, and fragments where her mother directs her to perform as a toddler. Using two cassette decks set on an electric piano stand, Annelieke mixes the archive into new compositions. Projections interweave the performance, bringing the archive into dialogue with newly produced texts and images. As the daughter of a performing musician, and the mother as the very first person in our lives who looked at us, a hall of mirrors unfolds. While memory and delusion intertwine, quiet fears surface: of never being ready to lose your mother, and failing to care for her. Performing the Archive delves into a family archive, the repetitions of family history, a mother-daughter relationship, recordings of stage art and ways of performing the archive.

Annelieke is a performer, director, and audiovisual artist based in Amsterdam. She graduated in 2017 as a theatre performer from the Toneelacademie Maastricht. In the following years, she initiated theatre and film projects in the Netherlands and Morocco with Queens Collective Marrakech, Dar Bellarj and ÉSAV Marrakech, while also coaching final-year students at the MBO Theaterschool in Rotterdam. In 2023, she earned a master's degree in 'Artistic Research in and through Cinema' at the Netherlands Film Academy, deepening her interdisciplinary practice. Her work, which sits at the intersection of theatre, film, and expanded cinema, has been showcased at the European Media Art Festival, Festival Cement, Le 18 Marrakech and Eye Amsterdam, among others.