¹ This project was created for the occasion of the Refresh Amsterdam #3: Imagine the future biënnale in the Amsterdam Museum︎︎︎ (11 july - 30 nov 2025).  

² The Amsterdam School︎︎︎ (Dutch: Amsterdamse School) is a style of architecture that arose from 1910 through about 1930 in the Netherlands.

³ The project title contains a reference to the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne by Aby Warburg︎︎︎.

⁴ Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR︎︎︎) is a form of psychotherapy designed to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Theatrum Mnemosynes is an imaginary theatre—part ruin, part sanctuary—where life’s scars are reimagined as sources of beauty, resonance, and perhaps even consolation. The project draws upon the expressive language of the Amsterdam School, that early 20th-century architecture in which ornament was not mere embellishment, but a vital carrier of emotion, movement, and meaning.

I translate the richly adorned façades and interiors of this architectural style into design sketches and plaster ornaments—fragments of a building we cannot fully enter, like remnants from a lost or future dream. These fragments serve as relics of memory, much like Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas: a constellation of images that refuse to settle into a fixed narrative, but instead spark new associations and sensorial responses.

The visual material is sourced from historical medical books on pediatrics: photographs of deformities, lesions, microscopic views of cancer cells—images originally burdened with trauma, loss, and clinical detachment. Through processes of repetition, mirroring, and transformation—echoing the logic of ornament—I attempt a kind of visual EMDR:  softening, fracturing, and reassembling the images into textures and shapes that hover between attraction and unease. For instance the large format black and white collages appeal through their symmertrical design when looked at from a distance, only to disclose their emotional resonance when look at from close by.

These ornaments are not mere decoration; I consider them quiet vessels of unspoken histories. They exist in the tension between the personal and the collective, the fragment and the whole, where past and present, loss and potential, meet in a single arresting form. In this theatre of memory, the visible and the invisible are woven together, inviting a different way of sensing, of remembering, of seeing.