Between the stage and the empty plinth
two artists on their research in Amsterdam
8 June 2026Both are at an early but already sharply defined moment in their practice. Their projects are different in medium and method, but share an interest in what institutions leave behind: the traces, structures and silences that outlast the work they were built to hold.
Charlotte Fourneuf-Niel — Recording the present: a curatorial jump into the everyday practice in performing arts
For Charlotte Fourneuf-Niel, performance is never just what happens on stage. “I’m interested in the conditions that make performance possible and in what remains once it’s over,” she says. Her research at NIAS moves across three interconnected questions: how photographs, recordings, sketches and protocols shape the histories and memories of live work; how remuneration functions as a political and ethical issue, not just an economic one; and how clothing and costume construct, or subvert, identity and power in performative contexts.
Amsterdam is not incidental to this inquiry. Charlotte will spend her time here in conversation with artists, curators and organisations working in the city’s performance scene, exploring how their everyday realities intersect with the broader social and economic structures around them. The time and space to think, she says, is what makes that kind of sustained attention possible.
Lou-Poko Savadogo — Turn a blind eye
Lou-Poko Savadogo’s project begins with a question that is quietly reshaping museums across the Netherlands: what happens to the building after the objects have gone home? As restitutions accelerate, particularly at the Wereldmuseum Leiden, the display cases, plinths and exhibition architectures designed around those objects remain. “Absence is not a void,” Lou-Poko says. “It’s an active condition.”
Her research-creation project Turn a blind eye takes that condition as its starting point. Through fieldwork in Amsterdam and Leiden, she documents recently reconfigured museum spaces and develops experimental installations that ask what these inherited structures might become, not monuments to what was there but tools of critique and hospitality. Bringing her artisanal practice into dialogue with critical museography, she is looking for ways to redesign the museum as an architecture of the gaze, from the inside out.
