From 1 to 31 October 2021, the Oude Kerk, in collaboration with the Hartwig Art Foundation , presented a sound installation by Portuguese artist Ana Guedes (1981). Her installations are often a mix of historical and personal stories. Inspired by the interplay between personal and political history as reflected in her family archive, Guedes’s work centres on the question of which stories are passed on and which are lost.

As in earlier works, Guedes takes the record collection of her Portuguese family as a starting point for her installation in the Oude Kerk. Having travelled across three continents, this record collection reflects the migration of her family. They bought the first records in Angola in the 1960s, after war broke out in the former Portuguese colony, and expanded the collection with vinyl from Portugal and Canada until the 1980s. The scratches on the records and the moth-eaten covers betray the passage of time. The records are passive witnesses to a displacement in time and space. The color blue is an important aspect in the work as blue pencils were used in the Portuguese dictatorship to censor sentences in texts.

The installation with a wooden frame and 3Dprinted panels represent the boat. In the background you hear a sound from the organ of the Oude Kerk. A video is projected on parts of the installation but also on the surrounding wall and interieur. After its time at the Oude Kerk, the installation has now been included in the collection of the Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed.