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EEW Art - Artist 2023/24 - Photographer Sjoerd Knibbeler

Sjoerd Knibbeler is a successful photographer who lives and works in Amsterdam. He has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions and won several prizes and grants, demonstrating the calibre of his work. In 2023, he turned his attention to EEW and the topic of sustainability. One of the things he wanted to do with this work – and his work in general – is offer an opportunity to play. The photographs of the sculptures created in Delfzijl illustrate what he means.

Searching for traces at EEW’s Delfzijl site

“I visited the EEW site in Delfzijl and found it fascinating that you can really follow this entire process from the delivery of the waste to the transformation into energy, but you can’t see the combustion itself. You can only look through a small window into the combustion chamber. And then, when we got to the end of the tour, there were these really big mountains of bottom ash and waste products. Sometimes the ash contains individual objects made of ceramics, glass and metal, which did not combust. These are traces of things that we used in our daily lives. Picking up these objects felt like collecting flotsam on the beach. In the studio, I rearranged various objects from this “beach flotsam” by size, shape and weight and photographed them as temporary sculptures. A second life!”

Our EEW Art Booklet features a selection of the works created and shares insights into how they came to life.

Carrier highlights

Sjoerd Knibbeler studied photography at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague. His photographs, sculptures, video installations and art books are found in numerous corporate collections as well as public and private collections, including the Nederlands Fotomuseum, the Foam Photography Museum, the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy and Ministry of Foreign Affairs.