Biography

Born 1944, lives in Amsterdam

Tjebbe von Tijen studied sculpture in Den Bosch, Haarlem, Milan and London. From 1965 - 68, he completed various installations, environments and expanded cinema projects in London and in several cities in the Netherlands. In 1973, he founded the Documentation Center of Social Movements at the University Library of Amsterdam, which he headed until 1993. Van Tijen has designed exhibitions in Vienna, Milan, Copenhagen, Dortmund and Hamburg dealing with ecology, urban conflicts and alternative and underground culture. He most recently developed, in collaboration with Jeffrey Shaw, the Interactive Installation Imaginary Museum of the Revolution. Tjebbe van Tijen is currently working as advisor for new media at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam and as a multimedia artist and producer under the name "Imaginary Museum Projects".

Quotes

Tjebbe van Tijen
Ars Oblivium. About the construction of our collective memory system.

"Information carriers that support our memory are mostly conceived as of being of paper, film, tape or digital. Strewn all over the world commemorative plackets, statues, buildings and historical sites tell us about the past. There is a constant process of erecting and preserving these information carriers. (...) Objects never intended to commemorate anything have been transformed into monuments of meaning. (...) Ironically such misinterpretations are very close to the way in which our personal memory system seems to function. Our memories tend to have contructive abilities that are independent of memories related to the past. "It is often more important that our memories seem real than that they are real" (David C. Rubin, 1986). We oscillate between historical memory and imaginative construction. (...) Do we know what we want to forget or are we simply forgetting? Do we know what we want to remember or are we remembering what others want us to remember?"