Feast Forum - dramaturgy, curation and mediation with Juliacks and TAAK
I’m collaborating with artist Juliacks, Stichting TAAK and the Huygens Institute for Dutch History (KNAW) on an interdisciplinary, interhistorical event about penitentiary practices - from the 1600s into the future. This will become the final chapter of the long term artistic research project Transversal Scepters.
Part academic conference, part workshop, part performative dinner, part film screening, part film shoot: the event brings together a diverse range of people who both affect and are affected by the justice system (victims/victims advocates, formerly incarcerated, lawyers, tbs psychiatrists, restorative justice practitioners, academics, judges, police, International Criminal Court makers, school psychologists, politicians, behavioral designers, social workers) to exchange perspectives, imagine futures that at solve problems from their perspective.
The focus of this chapter is on the role of Punishment in Justice and whether its continued presence in ideas of justice rendered should persist. With our participants we want to to think about justice and punishment today: What does punishment mean today and for the future with regards to justice? Why continue using punishment as a consequence to crime ? What is the future of justice, if punishment wasn’t part of it? How should one treat a person, regardless of country? How does our current situation-being confined in our homes affect our perspective on confinement and isolation in the justice system? This feast forum will be the making of a play and film that helps us focus on the present while dealing with the past, and the values that we want to bring into the future.
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Transversal Scepters | a transhistorical transmedia fiction investigating systems of confinement, power and systemic violence
Presentation & Project by Juliacks, Co-produced by Suzanne Sanders Research Text by Suzanne Sanders based on research by Suzanne Sanders & Juliacks
This artistic research project looks into 17th century reforms in criminal justice as being seminal for the development of penitentiary systems in both the United States and the Netherlands, leading to a fictional narrative told across and through different voices and mediums. Through researching the earliest criminal archives of North Holland, Juliacks presents mediated images of the first prisoners of the Netherlands, their close-to-follow first acts of resistance and subsequent uprising, contemporary perspectives from the Netherlands and the United States, as well as an imaginary future that reconsiders the understanding and application of justice and incarceration altogether.
About JULIACKS
Fiction and its layered construction are at the basis of Juliacks' work, which takes the form of books, films, theatre, performance, installations, paintings and comics. She creates narratives that unite, divide and perform themselves through the interweaving of mediums, cultures and time. Her stories touch upon social-cultural issues such as the denial of death, the quagmire of naturalization, and the construction of conflict, memory and belief. The audience interacts with the work on several levels—literal, symbolic, visual, aural—sometimes simultaneously, at times sequentially, referencing not only the contemporary context but also artistic predecessors and archetypal elements.
Transversal Scepters
Transversal Scepters begins with the historical characters of Jan Jelisz, or Gillissen (d.1613) and a group of four men: Pieter Jacobsz, a.k.a. Goeluck, Arijs Janss, Barthelmees Corneliss and Pieter Jacobsz of Delft, who threw what appears to have been the first documented prison uprising in 1613 at the Haarlem Tuchthuis. The dramatic fates of Jan Gillisen and the four men as described in the historical criminal registries resulted in Transversal Scepters: an artistic research project in various stages and shapes, in which interiors are ripped out of their context and woven anew, in the flow of a narrative transgressing temporal boundaries to current developments in the US and NL penitentiary systems.
Jan Gillissen
Jan Gillissen was a linen weaver by training, who, according to the criminal registry of 1610-1613 at Noord-Hollands Archief, had embarked upon the career of self-appointed preacher. Jan didn’t receive a prison sentence until his 4th arrest: although his religious opinions are not revealed, he was banished from Haarlem and its surroundings three times for quarrelling with priests, disturbing public order and distributing “his famous little books” that he had printed in Leiden. After repeatedly breaking banishment
sentences he was finally brought to the newly built Tuchthuis where he would have been one of the first convicted prisoners. Having arrived at the tuchthuis in 1611, Jan behaved quietly for almost two years.
Uprising
Then, in January 1613 the registry mentions four of his fellow prisoners throwing what may be the first ever documented prison uprising. Pieter Jacobsz a.k.a Goeluck, Arijs Janss, Barthelmees Corneliss and Pieter Jacobsz of Delft were taken into the Tuchthuis without any proper conviction to be ‘corrected’ for what is described rather freely as ‘leading bad lives’.The criminal registry describes them smashing various locks and doors of the Tuchthuis to gather a crowd of convicts in one room and blocking the entry doors by barricading it with their heavy weaving looms, preparing makeshift weapons and screaming that they would fight until their last man standing would fall. Within the same week, Jan Gillissen followed suit- he decided to work no longer and severely damaged his weaving loom. In January of the next year, when the judges visited the workhouse to determine penalties for the obstinate, Jan had obtained a knife and stabbed a court servant in the neck in an attempt to escape.
According to the registry the four ‘roervincken’ consequently were punished mainly ‘to the example of others’ through severe flogging in the courtyard of the Workhouse. Goeluck, as frontman of the riot, was convicted to work at the Rasphuis for several months, to perform the strenuous task of ‘rasping’ or grating tropical wood into a red dying powder that the Tuchthuis sold profitably to the textile industry. Jan Gillisen had been placed shortly in the Rasphuis as well, after which he would be forced to return to his weaving tasks, as it had been his trade outside of prison. Perhaps the hopelessness of his situation was spelled out before him by the judges when they visited, as Jan – to his defense – is then described claiming unrepentantly that, “this attempting to kill the officers was the only way for him to be able to escape this place.” With permission of the court in the Hague and in the presence of all the burgomasters of the area, the judges condemned Jan Gillissen to death as punishment as well as forewarning to the other prisoners. His execution, a rare occasion, took place at the Grote Markt but his body was shown and buried, not in a public space as the Schout requested, but in the courtyard of the workhouse to serve as an example to other ‘criminals’.
Boeventucht
In 1602, an almshouse was built to host the poor in the centre of Haarlem’s textile industry district. Following the ideologies submitted by humanist renaissance scholar (and Haarlem born) Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert (1522-1590) in his seminal book ‘Boeventucht’ (1584) part of the confines were converted into a tuchthuis- a house of corrections. With ‘Boeventucht’ Coornhert proposed a direct linkeage between idleness and criminal behaviour, and suggested various social as well as pragmatic solutions. The actual effects of Coornhert’s ideals of rehabilitation and the provision of work and perspective for the poor and unlucky are being explored through the historical fates of the ‘first prisoners of Haarlem’ as described in the judicial records.
The creation of the first institutional correctional facilities in cities like Amsterdam and
Haarlem, towards the end of the sixteenth century echoed the ideals of ‘Boeventucht’ as well. Not only would the ‘Tuchthuis’ model serve as the first penitential institution as we now know it to keep people like Jan Gillisen “off the street,” but it was unique as also being a workhouse for the poor, for folks such as the four young men who led the first uprising.
The inscription above the remaining vestige of the Tuchthuis, the entry portal held at Frans Hals Museum, reads Nutrit et Emendat: she feeds and she betters, referring to the civic goals of peace and control over the public sphere and the education of people of poverty and implied poor judgment. The responses of the judges throughout their trials reveal a societal outlook on shame and punishment that focuses mainly as examples of consequences to their community. Coornhert, as well as the judges in these records seem to be apostles of perfectionism: man is not conceived and born in sin, but rather in inherent goodness. The stress of the Schepenen (aldermen) on the justness of their considerations and belief in public shame over corporal punishment in their account reflect Coornhert’s trust in practicing faith and striving for truth and honesty. “With the help of Christ, man should be capable of attaining perfection even during his life as long as he consistently applied ‘right judgment.’”1 These initiatives were seen as reforms that would improve society.
However well intentioned, these self-sustaining and privatized early modern prisons paid for themselves and profited through their connection to the booming textile industry in the Dutch republic, which continued in the first Dutch settlements in North America in 1615, and thus ended up contributing to a system wielding forced labor. “Truth and justice” appeared within reach before 1609, however only a few years onward the practical application of these ideas in a privatized environment seem to reveal the flaws of this structuralist approach. For some of those incarcerated, the inherent uncertainty as to when ‘betterness’ was deemed good enough, working, eating and sleeping in this house for an unspecified amount of time, didn’t work. Although their cases are not related, the sense of desperation emerging from the accounts of Jan Gillissen and the four men seem comparable.
Transversal Scepters
Asking more questions than providing answers, parallels between the development of laws and punishment in early modern Europe with present issues and future anxieties are being dramatized and fictionalized as a means to reflect upon contemporary social- cultural issues while also devising collective transmedia processes that imagine new laws and standards.
The results of this artistic research were presented at the 2018 ASCA conference, Dissecting Violence. Previous parts of this artistic research were presented in an exhibition sequence that took place both at Ornis A. Gallery March 4th - April 1st in Amsterdam, and as a separate exhibition within the context of Haarlemse Lente, festival of contemporary art from 24-26 March in Haarlem in 2017.
Future events will include Feast Forums: performance workshops in collaboration with detainees and employees at a contemporary Penitentiary Institutions and an expert meeting on the matter in collaboration with the Huygens Institute for Dutch History
Bibliography
1 (Coornhert 1942, II, iv, 23)2 Speri, Alice (September 16, 2016). "The Largest Prison Strike in U.S. History Enters Its Second Week". The Intercept. Retrieved 16 October 2016.
Rechterlijk archief Haarlem, inv.nr. 66.2, fo. 175vo (Jan Gillissen, 10 februari 1610) Rechterlijk archief Haarlem, inv.nr. 66.2, fo. 183 (Jan Gillissen, 7 juli 1610)
Rechterlijk archief Haarlem, inv.nr. 66.2, fo. 190 en 190vo (Jan Gillissen, 26 november 1610)
Rechterlijk archief Haarlem, inv.nr. 66.2, fo. 193vo en 194 (Jan Gillissen, 6 januari 1611)
Rechterlijk archief Haarlem, inv.nr. 66.2, fo. 224, 224vo en 225 (Goeluck, Arijs Janss, Barthelmees Corneliss en Pieter Jacobsz van Delft, 18 januari 1613)
Rechterlijk archief Haarlem, inv.nr. 66.2, fo. 225vo, 226 en 226vo (22 januari 1613)
Clutton-Brock, T. H., and G. A. Parker. “Punishment in Animal Societies.” Nature, vol. 373, no. 6511, 1995, pp. 209–216., doi:10.1038/373209a0.
Coornhert, D V., et al. Boeventucht. D. Countinho, 1985.
Davis, Angela Y. Are Prisons Obsolete? . ReadHowYouWant, 2010.
Pillischer, Matt. “The Thread: a Podcast against Mass Incarceration.” Transcription : The Thread: a Podcast against Mass Incarceration , June 2016, www.defeatmassincarceration.com/.
Spierenburg, Petrus Cornelis. The Spectacle of Suffering: Executions and the Evolution of Repression: from a Preindustrial Metropolis to the European Experience. Cambridge University Press, 2008.