Scratch My Rijks, ©soltani+Leclercq
Drawing from the scratch technique of Hip Hop where the resulting percussive sound of a stammering record is used to various ends, in “Scratch My Rijks”, a proposal to cover the postcards of Rijksmuseum with scratch off film, the museum is seen as a repertoire of encoded works whose collection is concomitantly revealed through the museum’s primary missions of storing, restoring, and putting on view.
These tasks are emulated in single postcards depicting the museum collection by way of masking, scratching, revealing the
underlying image- thus turning the casual patron at once into an archivist, a restorer, an artist, the viewer- and reconstituting to the kitsch by-product, the postcard, the status of an original. The gold colour of scratch-off film is further used to bridge the high culture of the past with the emerging subversions of present mass culture, on the one hand alluding to the Dutch Golden Age, arguably the momentous cockpit of Rijksmuseum’s collection amply provided for on the museum grounds, and on the other, evocative of glitzy modalities of sweepstakes advertisements and instant win games ubiquitously integrated into
everyday shopping experience, mail, or online browsing.
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