It is not yet a storm at the Stedelijk Museum in Coevorden. The oldest city in Drenthe awakens slowly on this foggy Tuesday morning: more than a handful of people are not walking on the street. There is also no queue in front of the museum, even though the institution has been closed for a month. ‘How many visitors come today’, says director Rik Klaucke, ‘in fact does not matter very much. It’s about the statement we make by being open’.
In any case, the faces of the volunteers of the museum speak volumes. They are happy that their museum has opened its doors today. ‘Great’, Marinus Oost (75) calls it, who can normally be found here every week. The role that the museum fulfills for the volunteers is mainly that of ‘being among the people’. ‘With the closure, we also lost our function as a social meeting place,’ says director Klaucke.
The last press conference, in which Prime Minister Mark Rutte and Minister Ernst Kuipers announced that shops could open their doors again, unlike cultural institutions, was the last straw for Klaucke. “It feels disappointing and unfair,” the director wrote on the museum’s website. ‘We see no difference between a commercial transfer location such as a Bijenkorf and a cultural transfer location such as a museum.’
Klaucke said he could no longer sell it to himself that they were closed. ‘Because we can open safely.’ Today, a maximum of ten visitors at a time are therefore allowed to enter the exhibition about the history of Coevorden, Southeast Drenthe, Nordhorn and Graafschap Bentheim. Of course with mouth caps and enough distance.
“I don’t want to call it mutiny,” says director Klaucke, “but civil disobedience.” For the time being, the enforcers shine this morning because of their absence. However, from the other side where the town hall is, an eye is being kept. ‘Should it escalate, we will intervene’, says Liesbeth Mennink, spokesman for the mayor. ‘But it looks like we’re not going to actively enforce it. We understand the statement. We expect them to be closed again tomorrow.”
While there was relatively little protest from the museums for a long time, something seems to have changed since the last press conference. Jan Zoet, chairman of the Cultural Sector Taskforce, sees this too. “We just really don’t understand anymore. In terms of risk, there is no difference between a museum and a shop.’
The opening in Coevorden comes a day before the big day of action of the cultural sector. On that day, visitors can play sports in a fun way in, among others, the Van Gogh Museum, the Chabot Museum Rotterdam, the Groninger Museum and Slot Loevestein. At the same time, the action is ‘het Kapsalon Theater’, in which more than forty theaters throughout the country are being transformed into a hair salon.
From an epidemiological point of view, there is little difference between a hundred people shuffling through the Rijksmuseum and a hundred people poking around in a shop. ‘They are all comparable moments of contact,’ says Marc Bonten, medical microbiologist and OMT member. ‘The point is that not everything opens at the same time. What has the highest priority is education, which is now open. The cabinet has added the shops itself.’
Last week, many cultural institutions invoked the field labs from the spring of 2021, which in their view demonstrated that they could open safely. Bonten: ‘We now have a different variant than before. The transmission between vaccinated and unvaccinated also appears to have changed, which means that a QR code does not work as well.’
The cabinet will therefore have to make its own assessment, independent of previous figures, as to which sector will be given more room in the future, and where their priority lies. In any case, Bonten notices that almost every sector says of itself that it is ‘safe to open’. “But if it were, then of course we wouldn’t have a pandemic.”