Artist
Bebe Blanco Agterberg
Bebe Blanco Agterberg is a Dutch visual storyteller, based in Amsterdam.
"My work focusses on absence. Absence that we try to fill in with information. My mother found her biological family through a Dutch television show and even though she was reunited with relatives, many questions remain, including why she was given up for adoption. My mother was born in Spain in 1964, when dictator Francisco Franco was ruling. It always felt strange not being able to talk about my mother’s past simply because we don’t know exactly what happened. With my work, I’m there for exploring the process of reconstruction, and the distortion of narrative within memory.
The projects I make are dealing with the relationship between politics, media and citizens. How these three opponents feed each other, need each other, but also exist in a constant power struggle. I examine the reliability of the image in the post-truth era, it forms a grey area where fact and fiction live close to each other. This is the area from where I position myself.
My visual language is based on what I see in the media and comes from the connection I had with the tv show where we discovered my relatives. The show shaped and directed my memory so much and intrigued me a lot. I am therefore also specifically interested in that what has been manipulated.
I use artificial light in order to give a cinematic feeling to the work, which is based on emotions that tries to lure its audience into believing what is created in front of them.
In my work I take on the role of a director that investigates what truth means in modern times."
A Mal Tiempo, Buena Cara/In Bad Weather, a Good Face
How to live in a state built upon silence?
This is a photographic work based on a true story. It is a constructed story that includes images about how memories intertwine with reality and how they have a lasting impact on daily life.
The project is a reflection on the transition period in Spain that followed after the dictator Francisco Franco peacefully passed away in 1975. Spain needed to decide how to move from a dictatorship to a democracy. It wasn’t possible to have a clean break – a clear “problematic” before & “fixed” after. Some of the practices continued and still lay deep within the foundation on which Spain is built today.
One critical tool that was created in order to forget was the “Pact of Forgetting” (Pacto del Olvido) in 1977. The pact was an imposition that existed in different spheres. No one was held accountable for crimes they committed, facts were altered, new stories were presented by the government, and people slowly started to fill in the gaps of their memories with new information. Nothing was certain anymore and the pact became an assumed ‘historical truth”.
The project looks more widely through the reconstruction of memory how society can cope with atrocity. The work is there for a combination between the fabricated and the more documentary image and investigates how forgetting became a political tool.
In times of crisis which face should we trust?
Actors Rule the World
Televisions are tools that are used to change societies by moulding the aspirations of ordinary people.
During its first showing, city streets empty, crime rates dropped significantly and power stations had to increase production. In 1973 “Seventeen moments of Spring” was broadcasted for the first time. It was one of the Soviet Unions most popular TV series of it’s time.
The main character a Soviet spy named Max Otto von Stirlitz was created by the KGB, too recruit new members and to glorify agents serving abroad.
Many wanted to be like Stirlitz, but one in particular ended up becoming one of the most powerful people in the world today.
Vladimir Putin was one of those viewers. In his first television appearance in 1992, Putin re-enacted an important scene, depicting himself as Stirlitz. This helped launch his national political career.
Bebe Blanco Agterberg, a Dutch visual-storyteller working with photography, has a body of work that perfectly fits the book form. In 2019, Bebe took part in a Void’s activity that paired photographers and designers to make a zine in a day. Her politicized work stands out as strong and appealing. Her dealings with the Post-truth Era make the work relevant to our contemporary days.
Tereza Kozinc, who we first met in a book-making workshop, has a deeply personal, experimental work. Part of her practice is transforming it into zines and artist books.
Exploring the notions of ‘home’, Kozinc has an appealing diaristic approach that obscures the limits of reality and fiction. Joselito Verschaeve’s photography is technically meticulous. His editing process is very well-thought-out. He carefully plays with simple and banal subjects, elevating and re-signifying them. We were lucky enough to have Joselito as a trainee at Void in Athens. During his stay in Greece, he developed hand-to-hand with Void’s editor Myrto Steirou his forthcoming debut book that will be soon published by Void.
The subjectivity of the British photographer Emily Graham’s practice is what initially dragged Void’s attention. Her work leaves space for the audience’s interpretation, with rich and complex metaphorical potential. Her project ‘The Blindest Man’ is a captivating story about a real, unsolved treasure-hunting mystery. Open to interpretation and bringing much more questions than answers, ‘The Blindest Man’ will be Graham’s first book, to be published by Void in 2022.
Rocco Venezia is an Italian visual artist working mainly with photography. The subject of his works originates from a personal interest in literature as well as a certain awareness of European political and economic situations. Matters well-developed in his first book, ‘Nekyia’ (Witty Books).
Our selected talents of 2021 have, if not all, most of the attributes we look for in our books: well-defined personal approach to photography; a work open to interpretation, raising more questions than answers; and a creative blur of the frontiers between reality and fiction.
Being an independent publishing house, Void wishes to give voice to artists with bodies of work that might struggle to find venue elsewhere, that being due to the nature of their (dark) subjects, the experimental approach to their practice, or even the artist’s career moment. With this in mind, Void is extremely proud of fostering the photographer’s debut books.