Biography
Rita Hoofwijk is a Dutch artist. The motivation for her work always arises from a specific location or context. The work itself materializes in various forms, from spatial interventions and installations to audio and text. It explores the possibilities of the environments in which it finds itself, either mentally or physically, and seems to ask for a reconsideration of an (initial) observation. What emerges is a collection of work of different form and scale, which sometimes can only take place once and other times only exists in repetition.
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Photo: Rita Hoofwijk
In residentie facing faces
06.03.2017 – 11.03.2017
facing faces is an installation that makes people look at people. This performative installation is a proposal for thinking about how we view and perceive each other. With this installation, Rita Hoofwijk asks what happens in our thoughts when we look the people around us in the eye every day. Like an analogue film, a reel of portraits by Rita Hoofwijk is played before their eyes. Each face has a title that tells how this person is seen. That description colors the view, remains incomplete, offers the viewer a framework and asks the question: “How do you see yourself?”. What matters is that we look longer and more intensively together again.
In residentie Raaklijn
01.08.2025 – 01.08.2025
Raaklijn is a multi-year project exploring the ever-shifting boundary between the festival and protected nature. From now on, we will call this boundary the Raaklijn. Over the next four years, Rita Hoofwijk will invite a new artist and discipline to make this invisible interface tangible for us. During Oerol 2025, this will be the dance company Tumbleweed, through a choreography of touch and exploration.
The Raaklijn is an imaginary line that only emerges during Oerol and appears across the island, where the protected nature begins and the festival’s permit ends. However, this line is not intended to separate two parts—not to divide—but to entwine both sides and increase our sensitivity to the environment. At Oerol 2024, Rita Hoofwijk asked Oerol visitors to embody the Raaklijn themselves. Now she hands it over to the choreographers and dancers of Tumbleweed, who make the border visible through their own bodies.
In residentie Danu
01.11.2024 – 01.11.2024
From the Black Forest to the Black Sea, the river flows. The river flows and meets a city along the way. When the waters of the Danube reach Budapest, they are just over halfway through the journey. It takes ten days to reach us, and in another ten days it will mix with the salty water of the sea. The river has been making this journey for over a million years and has seen Budapest many times. ‘Danu’ translates as ‘the flowing one’ or as ‘she who was before everything else.’ During the performance, the audience, divided into two groups of equal size, gathers on either side of the river. They form a line and descend simultaneously, step by step, towards the water. Danu is an audio performance that uses headphones, a voice from the other side, and tap water with a pinch of salt.