Van Gogh House London

Collaborating artists and partners, Nina Glockner and Sachi Miyachi worked and lived as a family with their daughter in Van Gogh House for the month of May 2023.

Nina Glockner and Sachi Miyachi’s collaboration is based on an attentiveness to site-specificity. They share a common interest in the performative character of objects and architecture, choreographing bodies while affording possibilities for interaction and participation.

During the residency Nina and Sachi, worked collaboratively, researching and acting as domestic miners to investigate traces of the past, interact with the present and leave thoughtful interventions for future (non-) human inhabitants.

They spent their time implementing artistic mining and mapping methods in the house: uncovering walls, scanning surfaces by digital hand scanner and analogue frottage techniques, diving into newspaper archives, tracing dreams and gathering information through public moments.

Investigating the house and its history, interwoven with their actual lives as newly artist-parents, they drew parallels between 20-year-old Vincent’s days there, which laid a basis for their exploration of creating time, how it’s spent, how to get it back, how to map and physicalize it. The residency allowed them to start an artistic process that they are now continuing in their studios in Amsterdam.

This residency was generously supported by The Embassy of the Netherlands in the UK and Mondriaan Fonds.

Nina and Sachi were nominated by Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodriguez and their application was chosen by a panel made up of Livia Wang, Creative Director of Van Gogh House and Anna Bromwich, Director of Programmes. Many thanks to the visiting critic for this residency, Paul Bailey.

“It was an unexpected and intimate experience meeting Vincent in Van Gogh House. His identity as a 20-year-old future painter and not yet the mega famous Dutch painter we have come to know sparked reflections for us on the impact of being artists within certain social and political conditions.

As an artist family, we feel The Van Gogh House in London has done a brave step towards greater inclusivity within the cultural field by inviting and hosting us for a residency.”

– Nina Glockner

As part of their residency, artist duo Nina Glockner and Sachi Miyachi left a series of ‘traces’ as a reflection of Van Gogh’s experience in the house. In residence over May, the pair thought a lot about time, how to generate it, how to get it back, graphically mapping their time in the house meticulously at 15 minute intervals, relating it to Vincent’s. They traced dreams, mapped the feng shui of Vincent’s room and extracted the morsels of advice the young Vincent dished out in letters. These traces were on display during our guided tours on 27 and 28 May, alongside the other histories of the house.

Workshop with Baytree Centre

During their residency, Nina and Sachi hosted a workshop with local community partner, The Baytree Centre, at Van Gogh House. The Baytree Centre is a social inclusion charity for women and girls, and the workshop was attended by their ‘Into School’ group for teenagers recently arrived to the UK and not yet in mainstream education.

Inspired by Vincent’s love of The Graphic, they created a ‘Baytree Newspaper’ using current newspapers or weekly magazines from the countries the participants came from and 15 languages they spoke, collaged together with selections from “The Graphic” from 1873 and 1874, the time when Vincent was in London. Afterwards, Nina and Sachi printed and brought copies of The Baytree Newspaper back to the centre to share with the participants.

This residency was generously supported by The Embassy of the Netherlands in the UK and Mondriaan Fonds.