I AM WELCOME HERE
from the 2025 GRAduation Rietveld Academy diploma ceremony:
“Noël Sebastiaan Keulen
I AM WELCOME HERE
On the flagpole in front of the Bentel Crouwel building of the Rietveld Academy hangs an old-fashioned telephone, with a canopy bearing routed letters: I AM WELCOME HERE. That same text appears on a banner several metres long, hanging from the seventh floor along the facade: I AM WELCOME HERE.
On that seventh floor of the building, we are guided by green arrows over a green path to a second telephone. A transparent dome offers a view of the telephone booth below. It is up to the visitor to take action: call 21, to connect with a random passer-by below.
Around the corner are two wooden ladders leading to openings in the ceiling, inviting visitors to meet one another in a space above the ceiling — lit in green, with the focus on each other.
Communication and dialogue are key concepts in your work. Making a connection with another person is, for you, a way of being.
In your graduation work, you translate this in an inventive way into a well-considered installation in which it is not you who makes the connection, but in which you invite and facilitate others to do so. Visitors have activated your work over the past week. It came to life — with the tension of whether the phone would be picked up, with the pleasure of unexpected contact, with curiosity about the other person. Wonderful to see this work come to live.
Driven by a personal necessity, you want to embrace everyone in your generous arms — including those who do not feel welcome here, in the bubble of the academy. You are well aware that it is an uphill battle. Yet without an attempt, little happens. Tolerance as a theme is greatly needed right now. So is keeping the conversation open.
An installation full of hope. Hope that people will participate, hope that people will call, hope that people will stick their heads through the ceiling, hope that people will feel invited.
Your enormous drive to act has produced action. A large, monumental, architectural and social intervention in Rietveld and art world culture — now cast into steel and bakelite. You have broken a hole through the facade, provided a lifeline, and hope has become reality.”
ALLES IS OK NU
a cake was made out of the anger and frustration about an 'unsuccesful' suicide close to home. And how we, who can just look on, are forced to chow down the 'okay-ness' of the aftermath.
The cake was cut and eaten in a roam between festive ceremony and gloomy ritual, the cake bleeding and the pills regurgitated.