Life as a Museum was a first iteration of a posthumus museum, activating the archive of Dutch author and artist F. Starik (1958-2018) that was placed in the care of the Museum of Literature. The collaboration was sparked by his partner Vrouwkje Tuinman and includes an animation by Marina Sulima and Olivia D’Cruz. See Starik himself in action in this and this film.
At the heart of this- and other versions of the Starik Museum are the photographs I made after his untimely death, in his house and at the funeral. These pictures were initially made to serve as documentation for those close to Starik. In the exhibition(s) they manifest as miniature diorama’s and presented in relation to assemblages of objects that were part of Starik’s life. My role in all of this shifted from photographer to designer, curator, and back.
In 2022 a book was published in which Vrouwkje Tuinman and I present a further consolidated version of the Starik Museum, including selected unpublished poems by Starik himself and texts by Vrouwkje. In parallel to the launch of the book a pretty much life size version of the Starik Museum manifested in the municipal archives in Amsterdam.