De St. Laurenskerk 1940

This collage by Alie Rondberg-Vrauwdêunt features black and white postcards of De St. Laurenskerk pasted into what looks like a scrapbook. The placement of these images is interesting; they're not laid out in a grid, but angled, slightly overlapping, and accompanied by a handwritten title, giving the scrapbook a personal, almost diaristic feel. The material aspect is what really grabs me. The contrast between the glossy postcards and the matte, slightly yellowed pages. It's like a dialogue between the manufactured image and the intimate gesture of preservation. The photograph on the left of the church in ruins, is so haunting. The light falling through the bombed out windows, the rubble piled high, it’s heavy with memory and loss. This collage makes me think of Gerhard Richter's "Atlas," with its accumulation of images, a personal archive becoming a meditation on history and representation. And just like in Richter’s work, there’s a sense that Rondberg-Vrauwdêunt is grappling with the weight of the past, piecing together fragments of memory to create something new.