Our practice slammed into the current world crisis in the midst of an investigation on the kitchen knife. As for many parents during the confinement, the already artificial borders between work and caretaking of children thinned away. For us, as parents (of Rita 7 and Nilus 3) who also collaborate professionally, the confinement intensified and challenged the entanglement of these daily practices.

These imposed conditions created a unique intimacy that flooded every aspect of our lives with waves of love, care and trust but also of stress, rage and violence from both grownups and children.

Our research had begun with the exhibition When She Spoke at De Brakke Grond, December 2018. It employs the kitchen knife - a utensil that serves an ambiguity of nurture and danger - as a qualitative measurement tool of violence. Through the knife we evaluate tendencies of image making and of reading of images: from the props used to create a “wounding” image; through representations of so-called “terror”; to the ways in which we cut, split and rupture our visual material.

En nu? is an opportunity to show a clip of what we have collected, borrowed and processed with our children. 

Reading from Sheila Heti’s book Motherhood we delve into her look on the kitchen knife as a representation of an inner struggle which is also coupled up with the biblical story of Jacob wrestling the angel.

The wrestling of Jacob with the angel is a confrontation that is ongoing, to the point of exhaustion. At the break of dawn when apparently the angel must disappear again, he asks to be let go. Before Jacob agrees he asks him for a blessing. 

The angel blesses Jacob and gives him a name that defines him as “god-fighter”. 

A life changing wrestle that defines who Jacob is. 

Rembrandt’s uncanny version of this event in his painting Jacob Wrestling with the Angel from 1659, makes us think further on relationships between struggle and blessing, nurturing and confrontation, destruction and care.