Under the guidance of artists David Bade and Tirzo Martha, a group of young colleagues and art students are creating a special and challenging Gesamtkunstwerk for Bosch Parade ’24: Your contemporary demons. Their creation started with sketches on Curaçao and is now slowly taking shape during Teams meetings and brainstorming sessions. And that leads to joyful discoveries.

“Can you look for something of which you don’t know what it is?” For David Bade, it is clear: the search for the form, story and movement of Your contemporary demons is at least as important as the final artwork. “It is an enormous pleasure to start together from nothing,” he says.

That search began in Curaçao where David and Tirzo, with young fellow artists and students from the Instituto Buena Bista and St Joost School of Art & Design they founded, pondered the question: what are our contemporary demons? Their musings resulted in initial sketches and four sub-themes: perspective, confrontation, waiting and uncertainty (or unsure; in Curaçao, many young people speak a mix of English, Dutch and Papiamentu).

David: “Those themes are now being worked out in subgroups. For example, ‘Waiting’ refers to public transport, which is organised very differently on Curaçao than in the Netherlands. There you sometimes have to wait endlessly for a bus, assuming it runs at all. We want to express that vibe in that part of our artwork.”

Because it is already clear that Your contemporary demons will consist of several parts. David: “Yes, it will consist of a mini-fleet, a squadron of vessels with a joint composition and choreography of movement and sound. It will form a single entity that tells a whole story in a few minutes. How we will portray that story, we will decide together in the phase we are entering now.”

During this phase, the search will land in a workshop somewhere near ‘s-Hertogenbosch. And from May in the Garden of Earthly Delights, at the Citadel. David: “There we will then organise meetings with groups of enthusiasts who want to participate. Because participation is also an essential part of Your contemporary demons; involving all kinds of people who help convert the ideas into reality. For example, a sewing group is making a huge patchwork of textiles and plastic for a floating platform with mermaids and sirens.”

David: “Do you know what it is? We are not a group of artists who have a ready-made sketch design ready to go. Instead, our aim is to arrive at something new from a position of curiosity and commitment. It is a joint journey, full of joyful discoveries. And in doing so, you have to dare to be open to unexpected surprises and detours. Because that surprise or detour is there for a reason.”