Rosa Smits

Rosa Smits (NL, 1990) goes through life with open eyes and an open notebook. Spaces that hold contradiction draw her in: a wetland slowly disappearing beneath construction waste, a museum sitting on top of an unresolved colonial history, a café where a cat is giving birth and a bartender doesn’t find time to help. These are the moments where she tends to stay.

A feminist and circular approach form her practice as an artisteducator: collaborations that are fair, reciprocal and deeply attentive to what they leave behind. Genuinely curious about the perspectives of others and stimulating dialogues to gather multiple perspectives, she is equally willing to develop and adjust a view of her own. Artistic research is how she finds her way. Not through a fixed question, but through a rhizomatic process of encounters in various shapes: conversations, books, bodies and spaces that slowly and sometimes unexpectedly shape her understanding. Moving through the world, noticing what is present and what remains hidden, not only of museums and cities, but of every space and encounter she enters.

Over the past year, the IMAE Master’s program offered her the opportunity to broaden her practice, which was strongly focused on community building through collective weaving. Her work at Bronbeek in Arnhem; a military museum that silently grapples with its colonial past; led her to delve into curation, storytelling, and decolonization. Instead of viewing it as an interesting theme from the past, she attempts to voice that decolonising is an ongoing process. Drawing people in by weaving with a loaded material; the threads of an unravelled army jacket; she initiated dialogues between the museum visitors, Bronbeek's staff and residents. The work offered a tangible space that was filled with their shared perspectives.

Rosa was no newcomer to artistic and socially engaged work in Morocco, having an established working relationship with Amazigh weavers in the south of the country. In Tangier, collaborating with the Darna Association and the Donkey Museum, she remained true to her research approach. A few abandoned cityscapes and a huge number of struggling street cats introduced her to the world of animal welfare and ecology. This led to questions about care, dependency, and dignity that extended far beyond the cats themselves. It prompted her to create small shelters from recycled materials and place them in public spaces so that cat families could live in them and she could observe the community's reaction. This led to many street conversations about caring for street animals and issues of responsibility for people and government agencies.

Another project was the creation of a rooftop herb garden, for which she collaborated with a classmate and formed a team with the local staff. These staff now tend the garden, and the herbs contribute economically to Darna, as they are used in the restaurant below. For the Donkey Museum, dedicated to ecology and the life of donkeys through contemporary art, she wrote an educational text for the general public, along with an imaginative artwork of a donkey woven between the strings of a violin. What this year has made clear is that Rosa's practice extends beyond humans. Animals, plants and spaces receive the same quality of attention she brings to people. She asks who gets counted, who gets cared for, and what it truly means to be present in someone else's life and what impact it leaves behind, once you move on.

Keeping the world at arm's length holds no interest for her. She wants to be in it: affected, changed, sometimes uncertain, often moved. That is where the work begins.

The project concludes a three-month artisteducator residency in Tangier, carried out within the framework of the International Master Artisteducator (iMAE) program at ArtEZ University of the Arts, in collaboration with the Darna Association (Tangier), and supported by the educational, research, and dissemination activities of the UNESCO Chair’s Centre for Arts and Learning (UCAL).