It is time for all of us to embrace the moon 

Photo: Marvin Systermans
Photo: Marvin Systermans

    

In this moment of transition and the breaking of a new new year for SAVVY, we’d like to share these words by our dear Bonaventure with you all:

Dear SAVVies, dear family, friends, SAVVY community,

At midnight on 31.12.2022, my term as director of SAVVY Contemporary came to an end. After almost 14 years of offering, invocating, resisting, contradicting, carving space, crafting love, breaking bread, sipping fluids together, loving and caring, sharing and daring just to be — heard, seen, perceived, exist using art as a catalyst — the time has come to move on. One is not away.

At this juncture one would be tempted to list all the achievements I/we have made in the past years, but we cannot be fooled, for the journey is still too long and we can’t afford not to „see the forest through the trees“. What is most crucial at this juncture is to give thanks. Much gratitude to you all — SAVVY families, personal families, artists, workers, visitors, funders, contributors-supporters, communities, activists, politicians and all the intersections — who have contributed in making SAVVY what it is today, and who will continue to stand by SAVVY. Thank you for your solidarity!

It was this wish to express solidarity that led to the founding of SAVVY in the first place. That recognition that “another person’s wounds are your wounds too,” as the poet Rendra famously put it. So if there is anything I may add and wish SAVVY at this moment of transition, then it must be: please continue to work in solidarity with other causes, continue to resist with beauty and continue to offer in and with poetics. Let’s choose poetry over excess, go tangential instead of straight forward, and continue affording space for dyssynchrony, contradictions, disharmony, refusal and jazz… which is to say love and beauty.

Words fail me… so in that spirit of poetry, I will call on Rendra for support with two of his seminal poems: “New Year’s Poem, 1990” that summarizes the motivations that led to the creation of SAVVY Contemporary and “It is time” that I hope gives a direction of the present-future.

It has been an honour and humbling being with you all. And I can move in peace knowing that SAVVY is in good hands with Renan and the whole team and with the support of the larger SAVVY family.

May our ancestors continue to guide and bless us all.

Be well
One love!
Bonaventure