Romy’s ongoing research with and through archives and conversations sets the tone of this performance, as we invite audiences into the Contextualisation Room of Abstracting Parables where she has created different cues to engage around thematic focuses that think alongside the life of Sedje Hémon. Surrounded by books and records published by Hémon and accompanied by rebuilt walking protheses that Hémon invented, a sounding costume and other body elongations sensitive to movement and touch as well as light and projections, the performance moves around and plays with ideas how art history is written and undermined by the artist herself. The multi-layered performance follows, juxtaposes, overlaps and contrasts several questions that Romy Rüegger grapples with and through her ongoing research on Sedje Hémon's work and life: her unrecognized practice within the modernist frame by looking beyond the white male European genius and its circles, categories, appropriations and canons. As part of Romy Rüegger's ongoing research into traveler's histories music and performance practices, Rüegger will weave through these questions also sonically, from the records of Hémon utilizing the Romanian pan flute, the Nai, an instrument associated with traveler communities, speculating around Hémon's possible encounters with Romani musicians, during her incarceration in WWII concentration camps are explored through Romy Rüegger’s ongoing research with and through archives and conversations.

“This performance should be considered as a a work in progress, the emphasis on my understanding of relating to other artists as part of my work, as an intersectional feminist way of a re-telling, speaking along, and a speaking with, that is always in becoming... putting the physical presence of bodies ,materials, sounds, the spoken word and movements at the center: how to relate, how to imagine. How to speak about Sedje Hémon today? The length and duration of a lifetime. The length and duration of music, of a sound wave. Of embodied histories. Of a color, of a line. Of a chain of resistant movements"

Romy Rüegger

If you would like to attend one of the performances, please kindly let us know by sending a rsvp before Friday 7 October, 12.00h, to rsvp@sonsbeek.org 
Please let us know if you would like to see the performance of 12.00h or 15.00h. We are looking forward to welcoming you at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam!


Last year, during the first iteration of sonsbeek20→24 and as part of Parasite Radio, co-curator Amal Alhaag was in conversation with Romy Rüegger about her research on Sedje Hémon. You can listen to the conversation on Mixcloud. 

In the academic year 2021-2022 Romy Rüegger was a guest tutor at DAI, upon the invitation of COOP study group A Blues For Essential Workers.