Awareness of your own mortality gives an urgency to life. In 1926, Dutch poet Hendrik Marsman gave expression to his vitalistic attitude towards life in his famous poem Lex Barbarorum (Law of the Barbarians). To live your life intensely and completely was his answer to oppression and desolation; not to give in to fixed structures or the restrictions of any authority: ‘I acknowledge but óne law: to live.’
This spirit resonates with the work of Saminte Ekeland (Rotterdam, 1972). She feels a deep-rooted attraction to Marsmans’s writing and senses a struggle between dark and light in his poetry: ‘the dying of light, ‘our shadows’ and that what feels like a promise to life: ‘I shall use my time. I shall not waist my days prolonging them.’
Ekeland’s solo exhibition Lex Barbarorum on the one hand reflects this struggle as well as it is intended to express the celebration of life
and the individual’s mortality.