CultureBox

CultureBox is a new blog by South African art magazine ‘A Look Away’ assistent editor, Andrea Vermaak. ColourBox is “a colourful box full of South African arts and culture, from fine artists, graphic designers, sculptors, photographers and illustrators; to writers, poets, musicians and performing artists.”

And, yay, Andrea was kind enough to blog about my project Swimming Upstream.

I think it’s very cool and a perfect start to the weekend:) You can see the full post right here:

http://cultureboxsa.blogspot.com/2011/04/kathalijne-van-zutphen-swimming.html

Please have a look and if you like you can leave a comment as well.

Thank you:)

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woot! you, me and everyone we know…

This is the banner that is currently running on Overtone and which features as the headline on the press release as well. It was made by the fabulous designers of Taluut Design in  the Netherlands.

And *finally* sent out invitations and created a facebook events page which you can find here: http://tinyurl.com/2v8plb3
I want the whole world to come so please feel free to invite as many people as you like … seriously all mothers, fathers, boyfriends and girlfriends… the milkman and the butcher, your grandma and her dog *and* the cute boy next door… invite them!

Slightly out of focus

Here I am today, recovering from National Braai Day, listening to Sharon van Etten and trying to finish #5 of my 5 Must Do’s of this week. I am unfocused and my mind’s all over the place. I am trying to ignore my financial worries and the looming end of my stay in SA. It’s too depressing. Then I try to imagine myself living in the NL again and hmmm, not really want I want, even if my friends and family are there. In two days time it’s the birthday of one of my best friends, Suzanne. She’s expecting a baby. I won’t be there. And no matter how much I want to stay here and also to *not* be in the NL, I do miss my friends. I love my friends here, they’re awesome but my friends in my other life are awesome too.

On another note, you know how they say you must verbalize your wishes and the universe will hear you?

Well, this is it:

I want funding to come through for the Swimming Upstream exhibition and for the exhibition to be awesome and successful;

I want to generate work from it so I can stay in SA, at least until June/July next year;

I want to travel… I want to travel in Southern Africa; I want to see more of SA, I want to go to Zim. I want to go to Mozambique and Botswana and frankly, I still want to go to Tristan da Cuñha but that can wait;
I want to work for magazines; 

I want to stay.

 

 

There’s gotta be a way, there always is… I am just slightly out of focus and missing the obvious or too unwilling to accept the inevitable but I am still in denial about that. Just so you know:-)

The title for this post comes from Robert Capa’s memoir ‘Slighty Out of Focus’. He’s my all time favorite photographer. Fellow photographer and friend Henri Cartier-Bresson may have taken the slightly more high-brow and aesthetically perfect images but to me Robert Capa’s images are better, rawer, less observing, more present.

 

I remember this this conversation I had once with an American Jazz musician at a random train station in the NL. I was reading Billie Holiday’s biography and he came up to me to chat. According to him I should listen more to the likes of Ella Fitzgerald as she was the better singer (compared to BH), always on the beat, always perfect. My reply was that that was exactly why I like Billie Holiday so much more. It’s also why I love Robert Capa’s work so much. Maker of haunting images on D-Day ’44 and of  amazingly beautiful and somehow very human Spanish Civil War portraits. Traveler, with John Steinbeck, to Russia. Awesome, adventurous, inspiring, co-founder of Magnum, beautiful eye, a little dangerous, loner and ever so handsome.  

(photo: Gerda Taro)