Stroom Library Sessions: Caleb Witvoet

Date: 3 March, 2026 
Location: library Stroom Den Haag, Hogewal 1-9, The Hague

Participants: Caleb Witvoet, Boris Steiner, Iede Reckman, Sophie Lengle, Jan Dirk Adams and Thijs Ebbe Fokkens 

The second library session this year focused on the young artist Caleb Witvoet. The immediate reason for the invitation was his work for Hotel Maria Kapel, Hoorn,  an immense skateboarding ramp, that together with the vault of the chapel forms an inverted mandorla. “I strove to make an artwork that was subversive yet bound to its setting within a religious space.” Caleb  brought along a number of books that he repeatedly refers to in his practice as a woodworker, animator, jeweler, writer, and skater. They offer him “a wide range of interesting concepts for everyday life, sustainable practices, counterculture, building, and DIY.”  The artist started the session with his ‘reduX’ of Flann O'Brien's novel The Third Policeman, a hilarious book about an ‘atomic theory’ that suggests that people who cycle eventually become half human, half bicycle, a  fascinating theme for Caleb: As you work with material, you could easily get emotionally attached to it.” The ‘atomization’ of boundaries often recurs during our talk too, between people and materials, between art and non-art, between (non)-art and its context. Take Knock on Any Door (a Revised History) about historical collaborations and social activities that were never intended to make art, but which can be regarded as such from the perspective of contemporary art . Or ‘impromptu art’ like in Rudofsky's The Prodigious Builders. All the aspects discussed in the session come together in the chapel, with no felt distinctions between craftmanship, art, spirituality, secular use or whatsoever. Caleb: “Art itself is a kind of defying space.”