To Draw a Portal at the Edge of the World Nabuurs&VanDoorn at NL=US Gallery

For group exhibition The Noise—carefully curated by Glenn Kessler at NL=US Gallery in Rotterdam—we are proud to present a new series titled Memories Between Edges. Shown alongside works by Silvia B and Niels Post, our contribution explores the tenuous relationship between travel, memory, and the unsteady topography of place.

Memories Between Edges in the gallery waiting for instalment, 2025

Opening Saturday the 26th of July.

Each of the 27 works in the series begins with a single material: a used paper map, sourced from our personal archive spanning three decades of shared travel. These maps, often folded, worn, and frayed, were adhered to canvas boards. From there, we began to intervene.

All textual markers were erased—place names, road numbers, geographic identifiers—painted over in muted tones. We censored the language, not to obliterate, but to disorient. What remains is a surface without navigational logic: a geography of new beginnings.

Into this silent field we occasionally inserted lines from a song, a fleeting phrase, or an anecdote—then obscured these inscriptions again in white or black. Language retreats, memory negotiates. The work begins to hover between concealing and revealing.

The project draws conceptual resonance from Edward S. Casey’s “The World on Edge”, in which the philosopher proposes that memory does not crystallize in centers but rather collects at edges—those liminal zones where perception and experience intersect. Responding to this, we painted two opposing corners of each map-board with contrasting landscape hues. These zones were then blended toward each other through a haze of translucent white, forming a soft, spatial threshold—a boundary made permeable.

In one of these painted zones, we inscribed a portal in pencil: an open figure, sketched with a sense of quiet determination. Beneath it, our signature. Between them, a penciled ring tracing the canvas’s perimeter—as if framing not an image, but a site. A place for dwelling.

To close each work, we inserted a final layer: a Polaroid photograph, produced digitally but immediately, of a color field from another board in the series. These small, embedded photos act as temporal cross-references, creating a looped dialogue between works. They flatten time, layering one memory’s residue into another’s surface.

The resulting objects oscillate between map and palimpsest, image and invocation. They do not offer orientation, but invitation—to wander, to dwell, to read place as threshold rather than destination.

In the context of The Noise, where Post’s textual remnants fracture communication and Silvia B’s drawn figures hover in the uncanny periphery, our contribution acts as quiet counterpoint: a meditation on the possibility of presence through erasure.

These are not maps, but signals.Not destinations, but portals.Not images, but fields of return.

In a world saturated with noise—of data, conflict, and distraction—Memories Between Edges offers a muted geography, where attention becomes resistance and each censored map whispers an alternative way of being in place.