Jeannette Ehlers & patricia kaersenhout
Berater: Rolando Vázquez & Max Bentler

The winner of the art competition for a Decolonial Memorial is the Lockward Collective! Artists Jeannette Ehlers and patricia kaersenhout in collaboration with advisor Rolando Vázquez will realize the EarthNest. Architect Max Bentler is the technical advisor. 

Jeannette Ehlers is a Copenhagen-based artist of Danish and Trinidadian descent whose practice takes shape experimentally across photography, video, installation, sculpture, and performance. She graduated from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2006. Ehlers was Chair of The Danish Arts Foundation Grant Committee for the Visual Arts from 2020-2023. She has exhibited internationally and was shortlisted to create a national monument to The Windrush Generation at London Waterloo Station 2022 as well as a decolonial monument in Braunschweig Germany 2022/2023. She is the co-creator of the sculpture I Am Queen Mary, 2018, a public project.

patricia kaersenhout is a multi media artist of Surinamese descent based in Amsterdam and France. She studied fine arts at the Rietveld academy and did a postgraduate at BAK in Utrecht. She exhibits nationally and internationally. Patricia kaersenhout is the first black woman in the Netherlands to realize a monument of Flight and Resistance for the city of Utrecht. It was revealed in 2023 during celebrating 150 years abolition in the Netherlands. Her critical reflection on a colonial monument in Braunschweig, won an international competition and will be inaugurated in July 2024. In 2023 she curated a total installation about the colonial past of the city of Rotterdam.

Advisor Prof. Dr. Rolando Vázques is a decolonial thinker based at the University of Amsterdam. He co-founded the María Lugones Summer School together with Prof. Walter Mignolo, a school build around the commemoration of the abolition of slavery in the Netherlands. A key work he has produced on decolonial aesthesis, is the book ‘Vistas of Modernity: Decolonial Aesthesis and the End of the Contemporary’ published by the Mondriaan Funds. 

The work of The Lockward Collective belongs to decolonial practices contesting the legacies of European Colonialism. The group, formed in 2023, takes its name from the Dominican thinker and writer Alanna Lockward and wishes to honor her work and spirit by joining forces and materializing a decolonial project in public space. 

You can find an in-depth interview, with the winners of the art competition here: "who are the people behind the winning design?"

Link to artistic design