Raquel Van Haver 

Raquel van Haver admits she’s always felt like an outsider. While the Colombian visual artist, who lives and works in the Netherlands, has decided to return to her roots, she insists that she’ll never fully belong. This disconnect, or alternatively, this desire to reconnect, plays a central role in the artist’s artmaking. At the core of van Haver’s paintings is a reverence for old knowledge, which is apparent in both the weaving traditions of Colombia and the glass-making techniques she is helping to revive in Ghana, as well as a desire to tailor conventional methods with cutting-edge technologies. The former is a clear example of van Haver’s commitment to social issues, as in working with a group of female weavers from Colombia’s indigenous communities. She notes how these women are at risk of losing their heritage as younger generations move to the country’s urban centers like Bogota, Cali, and Medellin. To this end, van Haver is working to preserve and modernize the weavers’ practice by incorporating lasers, bringing attention to the challenges of marginalized communities, and using her platform to amplify their voices. She notes the personal impact of her work in Tamale, Ghana, where she and her peers collect and transform drawings into small glass sculptures, collaborating with museums and workshops in the Netherlands, Venice, and other parts of Europe to train and shed light on glassmakers in Kumasi. The artist highlights the importance of learning, and ultimately passing on knowledge, to future generations.

Even in her multilayered oil paintings and expansive murals, van Haver toes the line between art and social activism. In Ghana, the artist has sought to raise awareness of the conditions in local “witch camps,” or designated places for women accused of witchcraft, the majority of whom are forced to live in poverty and isolation. Working closely with Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama, founder of Red Clay Studio, she has brought to light the stories of women in these camps with whom she’s had the opportunity to sit down and craft drawings depicting their experiences. Through these collaborations, van Haver spotlights underserved communities, using her work to visually tell stories and offer more tangible support when possible. The artist notes the delicate balance of speaking on behalf of marginalized groups, as there’s true art in disseminating the word without co-opting their stories. Van Haver, ever-conscious of her role as an outsider,  treads carefully, acting sensitively and tirelessly in her effort to give voice to international issues. 

 

Though van Haver is drawn to serious subjects, she relishes taking a playful, experimental approach to each work—crafting paintings primarily on burlap and then infusing materials like tar, chalk, and resin to create a heavily textured, haunting effect. Working at the intersection of chaos and control, each painting is immersive and intimate in equal measure as she showcases subjects going about their daily lives in various contexts, bringing to life the unpredictability of the social landscapes with which she engages. Sharing her latest works, van Haver notes that artists who document their travels share a deep responsibility to discuss the social issues they witness. By doing so, they can usher chaos with control and reminiscence in the desire to build a better future.

Raquel Van Haver: I think by being an outsider, that will always count. Also, when you look, on one hand, it's really good for me that I do that in order to reconnect again with the roots and all that kind of, I don't want to say crap, or however you want to name it. On the other hand, like being realistic, I always will be the outsider. I think we spoke about this before. Anybody who grew up in a different place never can connect with that other place a hundred percent because you never were there during very important events. So, as hard as you try, you will never be that. And I don't think that I'm very much aiming for that. I just like to expand and understand. So now there’s the whole idea of going back to Colombia and starting a small studio there, working together with my friends so we can do more shows with the ladies from lava, who are the weavers. And with this Colombian curator and maybe with some galleries, we'll just expand my few. I think and I hope it will also do something for my work because, for me, at this very moment, I need to actually put extra layers again in my work. I think I've grown out of what I used to do. Maybe it's age, I’m really not sure, but I think very much that my work now needs a few extra layers in depth. 

 

We met a few years ago, when I was doing research for a series of paintings about female, social leaders or empowerment, and a friend directed me to La Guajira. I think they had worked with them before, or at least with a few people in this area. So my friend had an organization for, I think, over 25 years, that is very much socially structured in the system in Colombia. He’s also  a Hip-hop artist. They started with quite a big group and became very famous, very fast at a young age. They understood that to really change the cultural arena and educate people about it, they had to actually organize a place or an institute where people could organize and have a place for their workshops, where people could meet and so forth.

 

So, over 25 years, they have been working with the most incredible people through Colombia, all focusing on the social, so how to help people without papers. How to work with three children, but always in connection to art and always in connection to Hip-hop. So when he came with this list of people, all the women to speak to or talk to during the research, her name was also on the list, Sindri Gonzalez Ipuana, who runs AKUMAJA. And Sindri, I think she was one of the last people on this list we visited. And actually, immediately, it clicked. It became like a friendship. She spoke about her practice as a female leader in Wahida where she's helping and teaching younger women and women from smaller communities to use the weaving—instead of only focusing on the cultural weaving because they have to do a lot of rituals with weaving.

 

Weaving is like the main thing in their culture where women, when they are as young as 10, 11, 13, have to follow rituals where they actually learn how to not only weave, but how to weave their family's history. When they finish that first one, they can show it to the village, show it to the grandmothers. Then they decide, okay, it's time for you to become a woman now. They have been doing this for hundreds and hundreds of years; one of the oldest communities also in Colombia. It's actually a mix of Venezuela and Colombia. By doing this, they maintained, for centuries, a very specific culture.

 

At the moment, Colombia’s not doing that great, Venezuela is not doing that great. There's nobody to protect these kinds of communities, especially if we talk about Indigenous communities. They're quite endangered, and the younger generation, they want to go to the bigger cities. They want to see Bogota, Medina, whatever. So they all leave their place. In the end this whole cultural thing of weaving, maintaining and keeping the culture within the community is actually bleeding to death. And that is sad. So Sindri has decided, okay, I'm going to make it hip and popular again. And with her family and friends, she started to do workshops, speak about the tradition, connecting it to the art world. 

 

When we met, we spoke about this and I was like, “Listen, let's just do more projects about this. Let's open up a platform for you and see if we can connect me with my paintings and deal with your weaving and let's just see how we can maintain this for a longer collaboration.” So now building the space in Minka, I hope to also get her and her crew out there just to collaborate and  create a safe space for them to work and perhaps find new ways; like a sort of new handwriting for us to work on, with many techniques. 

I think for all these, during all these moments, I think I started to appreciate the old knowledge way more. You can now see it everywhere, my paintings or my installation's are coming back. I'm now starting to work with inlay. I started to work with glass, and really learn to appreciate that kind of knowledge, learn it and then organize at least a group of people around me who also can learn more together with me. Then we can actually pass on the knowledge to the next generation, also make it more accessible. During all those trips, I got so fascinated by old pottery or something in Ghana, just looking at the ceramics—it's wild over there.

 

But if I go to Colombia, I treasure the power in this old knowledge in regards to weaving. I think it became not like a quest, but definitely something I like to talk about. It's my fascination to really maintain the old knowledge and to just try and adapt it a little bit for modern times as well, because I'm not going to cut everything by hand now. I have a laser to do that. But it's a nice way to see how we can implement this old knowledge, and again, how we might make it more available, maybe easier to ship. There are so many questions when we are doing that.

 

As to my consideration of light, that's always changing my paintings, because light is one of the most important elements for a painter. We paint with light more or less. So any place, wherever you go, has a different light. Like Amsterdam has a silver light, very gray-ish, but very sharp. If you go to the Caribbean, all of a sudden you see so many blues popping up just because of the water level and how the sun is positioned above your head. Every place contributes something unique.