THE GATEWAY AS A POINT OF ENCOUNTER

‘The gateway as a point of encounter’ is a collaborative exhibition in puntWG, Amsterdam between artists María José Crespo and Madeleine Ruggi drawing upon the artists’ firsthand experiences visiting the Port of Amsterdam — a massive 4900-acre logistics hub handling some 100 million tonnes of international cargo traffic each year.

The experience of their own bodies gaining access to and being confronted with macrocosmic trading systems, territories, borders and port infrastructures is presented via Crespo and Ruggi’s separate methods of research, archive organisation and material experimentation. Crespo and Ruggi’s individual witnessing of the vastly connected world of commodity demand has resulted in this collaborative new body of work featuring sculpture, video, print, installation and sound.

This exhibition, ‘The gateway as a point of encounter’, marks a shift in Crespo and Ruggi’s previous mode of research which had centred on audiovisual presentations, such as their performance lectures at the Royal College of Art, London (2021) and Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam (2022). On 19 August, for the finissage of ‘The gateway as a point of encounter’, Crespo and Ruggi will give a unique public performance lecture offering insight into their research methodologies and processes of material translation.

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