Florian Braakman In between Homes at Witte de With
RAW Streetphoto Gallery was established by Alexey Shifman. Many years ago he has left Saint Petersburg, to go leaving in Europe - France, Belgium and finally to the Netherlands.
Florian Braakman, Rotterdam based artists whom gallery has created a solo show in 2017, has made the new series of artworks “In between Homes, Curacao - ik ben Rotterdammer”. He has presented this new series in Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art at the new project space Melly. In his works, Florian was following his neighbour Rino Alvarez to Curacao. It is important to mention, that Rino has left his home town 10 years ago for Rotterdam and since that time never came back.
Florian Braakman has documented Rino’s trip back after so many years of absence and was trying to understand what feels the person in such dramatic moment of his life.
It is an emotional journey that so many people living in Rotterdam have experienced. Rotterdam - city of RAW Streetphoto Gallery is full of many stories, some of them successful, some dramatic, but in each of them there is something to learn.
Florian is rising not only the personal questions, but political, ethical and economical issues of this migratory phenomenon. Though, there are many researches were made before the Florian, and most bright between them Paul Coller “Exodus”. In “Exodus” the author researches positive and negative sides of migration, and its influence on the welcoming side as well as abandoned places.In his approach he is using the analyses of migration data to make his conclusions, but on his way he is leaving the individual stories behind, making the conclusion very average.
Florian adjust to this statistics more human touch, and observation of a person living in Rotterdam from Curacao. This documentation of Florain creates more complicated and multi-layer vision in understanding of human drama of leaving the birthplace for totally new country in research for yourself.
