ESSAY—PERFORMANCE OF A LIFETIME

Memories aren’t neat summaries; they’re stagings of what we’ve lived through. Some scenes you find yourself rereading, rewriting and replaying endlessly, for reasons you can’t always explain. Sometimes it’s because the people around you never stop bringing them up. One story in particular keeps returning: me as a child, on a stage, on the deck of a boat, face painted and dressed as a clown. My mother still remembers it vividly. I was standing alongside two classmates, one playing a doctor and the other a policeman. I – supposedly absorbed in my role – stood there awkward and self-conscious, while the doctor shouted confidently: ‘Land in sight!’ Then it was my turn. The same three words should have come from my messy, red-painted mouth, but instead only a jumble of mumbles came out. Yet if you ask my mother, I walked off stage with my head held high. And rightly so: the audience had burst into laughter.

Beyond my mother’s retellings, a grainy photograph is the other relic of my pitiful little performance. The date on the back places the scene firmly in my timeline: I was five.  Twenty years later, I still look at the photo regularly, and I think of it again while viewing MY ALL ∙ A LOW BUDGET SPECTACLE by artist Luca Tichelman. This exhibition explores Luca’s enduring fascination: the building blocks that shape stories of identity – of the self. Stories we love to tell again and again, to ourselves as much as to others, even though they’re ultimately constructed. Luca calls it a ‘performance of a lifetime’. Each time I hold that photo of myself, I wonder what I’m really hoping to uncover through this story, beyond the fact that I was never destined for a career on stage.

I meet Luca on a sun-soaked terrace near Das Leben am Haverkamp, where she is preparing her exhibition. She talks about her influences and sketches the personal background against which the show will unfold. I ask whether she knows where her fascination with identity – the thread running through all her work – began. ‘As a child I changed schools a lot,’ she says, ‘and I discovered there wasn’t just one version of me. I could always get along with different kinds of people. Who I was seemed to depend on how my new surroundings responded to me.’

And so it is too in this moment: the setting, the sunshine, the conversation, all shaping my perception of her. For Luca, the self isn’t something fixed, but fluid – shifting with context, leaving room for play.

After secondary school, Luca studied performance at the Maastricht Academy of Dramatic Arts. She went on to pursue a film degree at KASK in Ghent, and later refined her practice at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, where her focus shifted to video and sculpture. Years of experience within these different media and disciplines are evident in the execution of her exhibition.

MY ALL ∙ A LOW BUDGET SPECTACLE has two parts. The first is a video installation where Luca herself appears as a hologram. Acting as a digital guide, she moves across a platform dotted with eleven miniature objects. Through an audio track, she leads visitors through this virtual archive, recounting the stories behind the artefacts. There’s no chronological order. After all, in your memories, everything often happens all at once: a teacher’s drawing assignment, a question someone asked at a party, an image from a fever dream, a line from the Spice Girls’ ‘Wannabe’ (I tell you what I want, what I really really want). Luca’s monologue shows her remarkable memory:

I remember my mother and father telling me I have a good memory.

And she admits:

I remember thinking all those memories will be gone once I leave this place.

However many memories the work contains, countless more are lost – experiences drifting from foreground to background before disappearing altogether. In the end, she leaves visitors with a final thought:

If a low voice ever appears asking WHAT HAVE WE FORGOTTEN? It’s perfectly fine if you’ve forgotten MY ALL – like everything will one day be forgotten. I’m just glad we shared this moment, and this one, and this one…

In the exhibition space, the same eleven archive pieces reappear, this time life-sized. There is no set path; everything seems equally weighted. My attention is drawn to a row of framed letters, captioned simply ‘LOVE’. Presumably love letters. I linger. Is it possible to imagine nothing at all about love? Am I drawn to them because I’m nursing heartbreak myself? Or is it the voyeur in me, wanting to know who wrote them and to catch a glimpse of their words?

The work, like much of the exhibition, leaves space for your own imagination. I think of the love declarations I once received: my first boyfriend in Year 5, and how I ended things after just a month by sending him a YouTube link of ‘Uit elkaar’ by Yes-R. Then the drawing I found shortly afterwards, tucked into the pocket of my powder-pink winter coat. I remember handing it, in tears, to my parents: ‘What am I supposed to do with this?!’ My mother must still have it, folded up in her purse.

There were other tokens of affection too:

There was the H&M bag containing the purple tulip in a plastic pot that he brought on our date, but only handed over when I asked him at the café door ‘what’s actually in that bag’. It sat on my dining table until nothing remained.

A worn copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera – ‘because it was his favourite book’. I read it, hated it, and underlined nothing but the line: A single motif can give birth to love.

A text  message after our first date: ‘I like you because I think you’re beautiful and because you have some passions.’

(And then there were the declarations I never received, the silence that made me remind myself: who I am is not defined by the love I get, but by the love I give.)

I move on. The archive is varied, yet all the objects share something: each claims to reveal a piece of Luca. The urge to capture ourselves in images and motifs is ancient. But anyone who tries – whether by making art or simply consuming it – eventually discovers how easy it is to lose yourself in the process. That fragile balance is captured perfectly, I think, in the words of Dutch poet Hanny Michaelis:

All the loose ends
knotted together
into a pattern
that lets itself live.
For days
it holds. And then
the hole returns
and everything disappears:
books, music, conversations
with friends. Only I
remain, pinned
to the edge of nothingness.

I think of the poem as I finish seeing the eleven works. It’s a striking thought: an ‘I’ that emerges only when the stories we’ve built around ourselves fall away. Over and over, through the same gap. And always, inevitably, we begin weaving the next pattern. In this endless cycle of knotting and unravelling lies the essence of the self. Luca’s self-portrait, at its heart, feels like a search for connection – a desire for recognition, and an attempt to reconcile past and present. But unlike Michaelis, Luca approaches it not with melancholy, but with playfulness, openness, and an invitation to talk.

I ask my mother why she keeps telling the story of my clown act. She says: ‘It makes the difference visible – between who you were and who you’ve become, or are still becoming. It shows, quite literally, that you weren’t always someone eager to use her voice.’ In my mind I replay the performance, with this new knowledge. The audience’s laughter turns into thunderous applause. From the back of the hall, a familiar woman’s voice calls out: ‘Performance of a lifetime!’

Read more about the exhibition 'MY ALL •  A LOW BUDGET SPECTACLE' here.

Author: Anouk Harkmans
Editor: Laure van den Hout (Mister Motley)
Image: Luca Tichelman

Supported by Creative Industries Fund NL, Stroom Den Haag and Gemeente Den Haag.