I’m Thomas and I am a hoarder

Hi Guys, first blogpost for der Greif. Decided to write something about my condition, as some would name it, because it has a strong connection to the work I’m making. In recent years I’ve been collecting many politically motivated pieces, mostly newspapers (yeah now I hear you think ‘oh god he’s really like the hoarders on TV’) – no no no, I carefully select and categorize what I need. It’s not like there’s like thousands of newspapers lying around in my studio. At least not all the time. Well, sometimes. Anyway, I collect a lot more, and for the sake of space a lot of collections are digital ones. Most of them have no direct purpose, and may not ever have one. But since I’m working as an artist it at least has gotten some form of direction. The habit of collecting things that surprise or amaze me, helps me to understand and rationalize it. Put it in a larger perspective. I’m not sure if it’s always been like this, but in recent years it definitely has. For a book we’re making, which is in the very early stages of making, I recently was asked by the designer to try and write up all the collections. A first attempt got me here:

Shizzle I used to collect:

-Rocks

-Flippo’s

-Postage stamps

-Coins

-Banknotes

-Old film cameras

-Empty bullet casings

-Things about Steven Spielberg

-Suske & Wiske comics

-Postcards (Boomerang)

-Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles stickers

-Dinosaurs

-Road signs

-Drawings of UFOs

-Filmclips of crying North Koreans

-Pictures drunk people

-Concert tickets

-World maps

-Michelin road maps of france

-Bogeys from my ex-girlfriend

Things that I still collect:

-Newspapers

-CDs

-DVDs

-Lp’s

-Pictures of Berlusconi

-Screenshots of artworks in porn movies

-Classified government documents

-Pictures of people who have a tattoo in their armpit

-Pictures of dusty people

-Photography books

-VHS tapes of Jurassic Park 1

-Video tutorials that explain how to do a Dutch gabber dance called ‘hakken’

-Photos of stained glass Pikachu

-Photos of poodles

-Deviled posters of Geert Wilders

-All the different types of beer I drink

-Recordings of the air alarm in the Netherlands

-Arabic versions of Michael Jackson songs

-Photos on which populists keep their mouth shut

-Things of the Twin Towers from before 2001

-Terrorist Images

To be clear; this is an incomplete list, just the first things that came to mind. Most collections have a lot of subcategories, like for instance ‘newspapers’, or ‘terrorist images’. I’ll show you a bit about that in a later post. Okay okay, I know you want to see the stained glass Pikachu collection.

Here it is:

Tomorrow I’ll get into some collections that actually made sense. Peace!