In the depths of memory
Performance video
In addition to wall sculptures, van Veluw also created a spatial installation and a film. The circular space has a prison-like feel to it, offering no means of escape. On the walls of the cylindrical room are endless cupboards filled from top to bottom with hundreds of heads. Is this a depot, a studio you find yourself in? Or are you inside the artist's brain?
In the film, we see the artist, caught in a neurotic work-frenzy, modelling his own head in clay over and over again. As if in a feverish dream, he tries desperately to fill all the shelves in the cupboards behind him. Every time he thinks he has filled the last shelf, a new block of clay is already waiting for him and the process starts all over again. It is reminiscent of the myth of Sisyphus, in which the protagonist is condemned to constantly push a boulder up to the top of a hill, only for it to roll back to the bottom. Like Sisyphus, van Veluw is literally caught in the obsessive repetition of his creative urge. The creation of his own effigy is a quest for eternal youth or an impossible pursuit of immortality — an ambition that underlies every artist's work.