The house was built in 1686 by a tax collector from Haarlem. While the interior would have been much more austere back then, one prominent flourish it has always proudly displayed are the dolphins adorning the gable.
It would be almost 200 years before ‘the house with the dolphins’ received a lavish makeover by distiller Willem Hendrick Warnsinck in 1870. That’s when the building as we know it today took shape with its richly painted ceilings and balcony overlooking the garden.
The Grand Salon and Golden Room were fully renovated in 2014, restoring the original 19th-century colors and replacing the heavily damaged ceiling painting with an interpretation of a 1708 painting by Abraham Bisschop based on the ancient Greek fable The Bird in Borrowed Feathers.
During GLUE you can see the exhibition 'THINKING THE ARCHIPELAGO' a GLUE exhibition by Black Childish, Felt Atelier, Ike Melchizedek,, Niño Divino, OHIM and Yara Forster
THINKING THE ARCHIPELAGO brings together distinct creative practices by makers with roots across the wider Caribbean, including Suriname.
Inspired by Édouard Glissant’s archipelagic thought, the exhibition looks to the archipelago as a model for being in relation: independent islands, each carrying its own identity, history and perspective, connected without having to become the same. THINKING THE ARCHIPELAGO resists the expectation that bringing makers from the wider Caribbean together must result in a singular story about cultural identity. The makers’ cultural backgrounds may be explicitly present, subtly embedded, or at times not visible in their work at all.
Between our different shores lies water, a space that both separates and connects. For centuries, colonial powers used these waters to control movement, trade and territories, creating divisions that shaped our cultures and relationships to place and one another. Today, we reclaim the water as a space of relation, memory, movement, spirituality and connection.
Gathering here becomes more than a presentation of individual practices; it becomes a collective act of resistance and renewal. Stadssalon is situated within Amsterdam’s Gouden Bocht, a place deeply intertwined with colonialism and historically not intended for us. Here, we claim that space on our own terms.
Healing from historical division requires active connection. We choose to see the space between us not as a wall built by history, but as an open current through which we can meet, connect and move forward.
Register for the opening via: https://www.eventbrite.nl/e/opening-thinking-the-archipelago-group-exhibition-during-glue-amsterdam-tickets-1999263588211
