Flows of Capital concludes a three-year archival research project into the Dutch colonial history of New York City, and its contemporary reverberations. Through a transhistorical lens, the project traces the rise of capitalism through the Dutch colonization of Manhattan; from the 17th-century Amsterdam stock market – home to the world’s first publicly traded companies, the VOC and WIC – to present-day Wall Street. Flows of Capital illuminates how the Dutch WIC colony on the southern tip of Manhattan grew, over four centuries, into the global financial center of the world.

The project consists of a 3-channel 16mm installation that interweaves footage of contemporary Amsterdam & New York. The cityscapes map the colonial history, all of the footage is shot in areas that were part of the 17th century Amsterdam-New Amsterdam connection; the streets in the financial district, the area around the Amsterdam stock market, and the canals through which the commodities extracted from North America would flow in. This footage is accompanied by a guiding voiceover; drifting through the financial chapters of 17th-century Amsterdam, colonial New Amsterdam, and contemporary New York. Flows of Capital deconstructs the Dutch colonial forces that shaped the contours of the global system that structures our present. 

The project premiered in Het West-Indisch Huis, the headquarters of the WIC between 1623 and 1643, and thus the location where the formal colonization of Manhattan was decided. 

hetvrijearchief.net is a collaboration between Luna Hupperetz and Kenneth Geurts. The Vrije Archief Nieuwmarkt is an autonomous archive that documents the activism of the Aktiegroep Nieuwmarkt (1967-1976) against Amsterdam’s post war city planning. The audiovisual collection of Vrije Archief Nieuwmarkt consists of sound and image recordings, the unsynchronised footage is currently housed in the archives of IISH (audio) and Sound & Vision (film). The collection’s Creative Commons status, and the platforms of the institutional archives invite creators and researchers to engage with the material, yet constraints of archival access make accessibility opaque. Unlike textual materials, the transition of visual content into the public domain remains imperfect, demanding critical observation. In response, the web based installation hetvrijearchief.net advocates for squatting the archive. Through a dynamic shuffle of image and sound snippets,  it aims to embrace the archive’s dispersion and accentuate re-appropriation possibilities by inviting  the audience to create their own assemblages of unsynchronised archival material.  Seeking to transcend traditional audiovisual frameworks, it poses a question: how can these methods resonate with the practice of squatting and image appropriation? Moreover, it endeavours to bridge generational gaps, inviting reflection on communal resistance and housing crises in a contemporary context.

Cows After All is a 16mm work about ephemerality. It’s an experimental assemblage of images that culminates in a looped shot which ultimately destroys itself. The film is projected directly from a 16mm reel: through the physical manipulation of the film reel, the piece gradually throws itself off the projector during the final, repeating frames—enacting a form of self-destruction until it is reloaded.

The film was made in a week during the Casa Do Xisto residency (Porto, Portugal). The 16mm film was developed using a non-toxic processing method that involves instant coffee, mint, and other natural ingredients.

Faced with clear time constraints, Casa do Xisto’s focus on eco-friendly film development immediately evoked ideas of ephemerality for me—especially in contrast to the traditionally harsh chemical developing process of film. The soundtrack of the work is an altered loop of a field recording from my personal archive, which was recontexualised for this work. The field recording was recorded in Croatia during a period in which I was personally grappling with themes of impermanence.

Tracing New Amsterdam is the result of an eight month research project in the archives of New York (city & state), in which I traced the rise of global capitalism by delineating a map between two junctures: Amsterdam as the 17th century centre of capitalism, and New York City as its contemporary counterpart – with the colonisation of New Amsterdam as the stitching of this map. The video work examines Pearl Street in the Financial District of Manhattan, which follows the original shoreline of the island Manhattan, before it was moved outward through landfill in the 18th century. The work on fabric is an exploration of Joseph Pensa de la Vega’s Confusion of confusions (1688) – the first work written on the stock market. In which de la Vega makes extensive use of metaphors and allegories to illustrate the labyrinth like nature of the trade of shares as it occurred in Amsterdam at the time.