Esmée’s work is photographic in origin but has developed into a very multifaceted practice during her education at Rotterdam’s Piet Zwart institute. Besides photography, her work now includes sculpture, painting, text and installations. She uses all these media to create very personal inventories, arrangements and ultimately an expanding archive of often mundane, homely items and settings. Objects and situations that are prone to be overlooked but that carry – when seen in relation to each other – unspoken political and emotional value. By making selections within this ever expanding and subjective archive, she is able to express histories that were carefully swept under a heavy carpet of silence. That what you see is of equal importance to that what you don’t see. A central thesis in her practice and one that she expands to the domain of identity. She describes how the construct of one’s identity can be shaped by unseen trajectories, unspoken histories and strong but unexpressed forces. Displacement and in-authenticity are defining factors in the shaping of identity, as much or even more so than their more truthadjecent counterparts. What happens when new information invalidates or even erases part of your sense of self? Esmée Bruins uses the notion of an archive as a system for a new, more fluid way of uncovering histories. Not a chronological sequence of facts but a more open, narrative approach that finds space for meta cognitive reflection on the generation of (personal) histories.
