Art & Poetry | marionbloem

Poetry

'Freedom' - Marion Bloem

Music: Tjeerd Oosterhuis - Video: Yvonne Maya Bakker

Voice-overs a.o. - Jan Mulder, Katja Schuurman, Hind, Edsilia Rombley, Howard Komproe, Thé Lau, Denise Jannah, Inci Pamuk, Stijn van der Loo

About 'Freedom' - Marion wrote the poem in 1999 at the request of Het Nationaal Comité 4 en 5 mei. It was selected as a video poem to be broadcast on television several times a day for a month in May 2000.

After a call on Facebook in May 2011, the poem was translated into several languages. There are now more than 100.

Translating this poem about freedom confronts us with the various ways in which different countries, cultures and population groups deal with 'freedom'. Expressions and imagery associated with 'freedom' are not always translatable. Therein lies the immediate challenge of approaching the content of the poem in the relevant language as closely as possible. The translations vorm in turn inspire the making of video clips.

'Freedom' is one of the most misused concepts of our time. It is used to justify wars, to affirm differences between cultures and religions, to defend policies, and to propagate the free market principle and the related idea of freedom of consumption. The poem embodies the discussion about the balance between guarding the rules that allow coexistence with others and the importance of the individual to live freely. Art challenges you to think about it.
In 2005 Tjeerd Oosterhuis made an audio clip of the poem “Freedom” for the campaign “Een Royaal Gebaar”, intended to effect a general pardon for asylum seekers who had lived in the Netherlands for more than five years. It became a great success.

Poetry Editions

Marion Bloem was twenty when she had her son. After several months it was found that he had a life-threatening heart disease. More than four years later he was declared cured. Her son is now over thirty and a father himself. In this book Marion Bloem reports for the first time about the fight she and her husband Ivan Wolffers had to fight for their son. But above all, it is a book about the love between mother and child and the many ways in which it expresses itself. A very personal book, with beautiful illustrations made by the author himself.

A selection of fifty poems and three video poems on CD-ROM, written by Marion Bloem between 1968 and 2001.

Poem written and read by Marion Bloem on the occasion of the national commemoration at the Indisch Monument in The Hague on 15 August 2009

In this collection we find poetry about her father, motherhood, her own grandmotherhood and about her relationship with her husband, who was confronted with prostate cancer a few years ago. Personal events processed in poems and paintings.