Otemba - Daring Women

• Date: 23 November
• Time: 15:00
• Location: Amare, Conservatoriumzaal

Please keep in mind this event is in Dutch!

During the restoration of a 17th-century painting at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Japanese-Dutch Cornelia van Nijenrode steps out of her frame and into the 21st century. She challenges Kirana Diah from Indonesia, who is restoring the painting, to a nocturnal conversation about wildness and the decolonization of the gaze. Their confrontation sharpens as their radically different personal histories reveal striking and unsettling similarities.

Program
Misato Mochizuki – Otemba
Otemba is an opera about decolonizing our gaze — how we look at others and at ourselves. The restoration of a painting is often described as “management of change.” How we look at our history — how we gather knowledge, create knowledge, and rewrite history — is a political act. The way we restore a painting is, too.

Two uprooted women and a robot meet outside the boundaries of chronological time. It is a magical moment in the restoration process, a one-time nocturnal encounter that transcends time and space — between painting and reality, between past and present, between East and West. The aim: to decolonize their thinking and doing.

The cultures and histories of Japan, Indonesia, and the Netherlands may seem worlds apart, but they are historically intertwined — and not without tension. The artistic team behind Otemba, hailing from these three countries, carries their own cultural and historical legacies. Together, they take on the challenge of confronting and questioning each other as strangers, across distances of time, space, class, and gender. Through music, language, movement, and theatricality, they create a new meeting ground between diverse identities and cultures.

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