Image: Vanita and Johanna Monk (with Geo Wyex, not pictured), We Don’t Believe in Love, unannounced street performance and video installation, RUIS Gallery/Qtopia Queer Arts Festival, Nijmegen, 2019. Still from videography by Leo Allende.
Saturday, January 24, 2026
8:00 PM
A Year in the Life of a Plane Tree Outside Our Window: Silent Film Scored by Johanna Monk and Friends
With live improvised music and poetry reading by Muchmo: Nora Mulder (prepared and processed piano), Nico Chientaroli (synthesisers) and Johanna Monk (conductor, woodwinds, percussion, reading) and special guests Ig Hennenman (viola), Ada Rave (saxophone) and Lara Lupa (reading).
‘For one year, Vanita filmed the big tree outside our window, in various situations: sunlight shimmering through the leaves, moonlight, rain, wind, shedding leaves in the autumn, growing new leaves in the spring, thunderstorm, birds visiting, snow heavy on the branches, reflection on the glass of objects inside our home, even new years’ fireworks. And all this time, the branches growing so slowly that even over a whole year, they still look very much the same… We will also be reading some poetry.’ (Johanna Monk)
Biographies
VANITA and JOHANNA MONK made and performed art, music and literature together for thirty-five years until Vanita’s death in 2024. Johanna now continues this collaboration beyond the boundary of life, her practice existing on a continuum from past to future, between estate curation and new works rooted in a personal mythology of love, trauma, healing, violence, transformation, lust, enlightenment and death.
Part of the exhibition