"The discovery of my family history and the distance from Los Angeles made me look at my own country from a different perspective."
This week Esther Didden is in Kortenhoef, at the studio of Hans Broek. Hans lived in Los Angeles at the time of rising interracial tensions, think of truck driver Rodney King being chased and beaten up by police officers. Think of the trial of O.J. Simpson. Events that made news around the world.
When Hans read in an old booklet about his family's genealogy that a successful relative was involved in the slave trade as a board member of the Admiralty of Amsterdam in the 17th century, he saw a connection between what was happening in American society and what his own family had done three hundred years earlier. It changed his work.
"I went to Los Angeles to paint landscapes. The buildings in those paintings carry a certain guilt and the cruelty of the past."
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