The Drents Museum comes with a new exhibition about caravan dwellers, or ‘travelers’ as they prefer to be called. ‘Concrete traveler’ Bart Bauer is happy with it. “I especially like that an exhibition has been made with us instead of about us,” he says in the Radio Drenthe program Cassata.
Bauer himself no longer lives in a caravan, but in a house. That is why he refers to himself as a ‘concrete traveler’. “My daughter wanted to live in the caravan, that’s why I went to live in a house,” he explains. He would like to live at the camp, but that is difficult. “There are far too few standing places in Hoogeveen, but that is a national problem.”
The exhibition fits in a road that the Drents Museum took in 2023, says Jonathan van der Meulen of the museum. “In 2023 we had an exhibition about Moluccans. That is also a group that is less heard and that also applies to travelers,” he says. “They are less heard in the media, but also less present in our collection.”
And that fact makes it a lot harder to set up an exhibition. That is why the help of the travelers themselves was called. Van der Meulen made contact with the Bauer family and found an ambassador in Bart. He helped to make contacts and to win the confidence of other travelers. “Of course I know a lot of people and it was easy to cross people to tell or show something,” says Bauer. Because much was often not needed for that. “If people were reluctant, I went for a cup of coffee. Then I explained how it was and then they said” Okay, just then. “
Together with Bauer and the rest of the working group consisting of travelers from Coevorden, Emmen and Hoogeveen, Van der Meulen searched for objects for the exhibition. That happened on the basis of three themes. “We are going to make a journey on the service road as travelers did. That starts just after the Middle Ages. In that theme we find, among other things, the ‘Kiep’, a kind of old -fashioned backpack,” he says.
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