Since last year, this gallery space of Witte de With has been used as a site for displays and events. It also functions as bookshop and classroom. These developments on site developed in connection with an initiative on collective learning, which, among other things, entails a work/study program designed for Rotterdam youth. The first edition of this program took place from September 2018 to February 2019. It involved nine participants, and it thematically centered on identity issues, hospitality and entrepreneurship. As part of the program, the participants were tasked to propose a new identity for the space. They proposed naming it MELLY, towards creating a more welcoming environment and conversation-based program.
Over the past two decades, Alejandro Cesarco has been making art, publishing books, and curating exhibitions. His expanded practice centers on a close consideration of affect, or as Cesarco states it, “the way meaning is felt.” With a deep interest in conceptualism’s linguistic turn, he has investigated the meanings of measured expression, the emotional cadence of feelings (however sincere, contradictory, or uncomfortable these may be), and the common and varied languages that emerge from emotional ties and genealogies.
Rossella Biscotti’s work has dealt with an exploration of forgotten or untraced events that may come to reveal changing value systems, whether in their processes of production or consumption. The artist is interested in description, and in manifesting through sculpture and images, as well as through other genres and materials, the constitution of sentient beings as they are and not only as they may come to be perceived. She does so with an attentiveness towards revealing individual narratives, which she draws as much from oral histories, as she does from her technical, archival, and field research into sites that have been historically tapped by different forms of mining, exploitation, and confinement.