Willem de Rooij

In his work, Willem de Rooij (born in Beverwijk in 1969) focuses on issues of representation and meaning. Since the early 1990s, he has been using various media, such as photography, sound, film, and sculpture, to explore the production, contextualization, and interpretation of images. Abandoned and repurposed materials, such as found pictures and objects from historical and anthropological collections, play a crucial role, as do works by other artists. His conceptual works often take the form of installations reflecting the physical and contextual characteristics of the space they occupy.

Willem de Rooij’s contribution to the exhibition deals with questions of political representation in the context of remembrance. His work is a proposal for two new memorial plaques in the memorial room in the former concentration camp at Dachau, which he depicts in the exhibition in the form of a label. The starting point was his research on the persecution of homosexual people under the Nazi regime and the marginalized remembrance of these victims during the postwar period. This theme is exemplified by the history of the monument designed by Yugoslav artist Nandor Glid for the memorial site in 1968 featuring triangles in yellow, red, blue, brown, that represent all groups of prisoners. In 1995, a Munich-based initiative succeeded in having a pink triangle – the color homosexuals were forced to wear – placed in the adjacent memorial room inside the museum at Dachau. Now, de Rooij proposes representing the other two “forgotten” groups of victims as well, adding a black triangle for those stigmatized as “antisocial” and a green one for “habitual criminals” in the same room, in memory of these other groups who were subjected to persecution and imprisonment. These categories were extremely diverse, encompassing everyone from prostitutes to homeless, petty criminals, alleged “shirkers” and those maladapted to society alongside serious criminal offenders. The vast differences among these people are one reason their plight has largely been ignored. De Rooij’s proposal is a starting point for representing groups whose diverse nature has led to not being represented in the past.