Hey, the table sticker was there again, at the table this time Khalid & Sophie. On Tuesday evening, climate activist Jelle de Graaf clung to the talk show table of Jinek. A fellow activist glued his head on Thursday The girl with the pearl from Vermeer. Another, himself stuck to the wall with one hand, tossed another can of tomato soup over his glued skull for shock effect. “Shame on you”, you heard a bystander squeak in the video.
The Mauritshuis – that is where the painting hung – wanted to pay as little attention as possible to the campaign. So the talk show did. And it had clearly scaled up since Tuesday. Also at the table are two makers of climate documentaries, Bram Vermeulen (Frontline on Thursday) and Nicolaas Veul (The climate explorer on Friday). Furthermore, a climate activist and table lady Wouke van Scherrenburg who had finally wanted to put a “decent vegetable dish” on the table at home, but immediately jumped into the car (!) to talk about the “world that is on fire”. She’d watched Jelle’s sticking action on the iPad, she said, and had been clapping all by herself. The other lady at the table, Anniko van Santen, thought that the message was ‘diluted’ by the extreme means used by climate activists.
Bram Vermeulen, who has just returned from Greenland, where the sea has not been freezing for 25 years, had to look back with Jelle at the table for “a fragment” of Jelle on the table. Jelle was invited to that table on Tuesday evening to talk about the actions and their usefulness. If you ask him about what we have to do, just for a moment’s practicality, he will get abstractions about ‘the fossil fuel industry’ and Prime Minister Rutte, who is best friends with the director of Shell. No, that’s what it’s all about. Who oh who do you ask at the talk show table to tell us what we can, no, should do and (especially) not do?
Weeds don’t exist
Why did we actually make hoeing a community service, you wonder after seeing the movie Code Green (HUMAN). Confusing, because you just see everyone in an orange work suit as half-criminal, and for the workers in the green, it’s not particularly a boost either. Marjoleine Boonstra follows the men (and one woman) who work for social development company Pantar in Amsterdam. They do not hoe as punishment, but in “freedom”. They are ashamed at first, says foreman Theo about the newcomers in his shack. A few have spent a few years behind bars, but most have gotten stuck in life through other twists and turns. Addiction, confusion, loss of work and home. “The work is not important in the first months.” Arriving on time, getting discipline, getting a routine, that’s what Pantar is all about. If they have a feeling for working in a green environment, so much the better. Theo points the men to the fireweeds under the honeysuckle, plantain and arugula. “There are no weeds,” he says. “That’s what people make of it.” Just as the people turn green into a landfill, the grabs of the green workers get more rubbish out of the bushes than weeds.
The most beautiful scene is the one with Pantar’s new director ‘Werk’, Saskia Floore. The boss of a team of 70 people who again manage 700 people comes one day to hoe between the blackberries and the roses. She is a greengrocer. “Hard work,” she discovers. How Leslie then explains to her how to do it, hoeing. And how concentrated she looks at how he shows it.
Anton, Amina, Leslie, Luuk, Edwin, Alexandar each have their say. They tell just enough to make you want to know a lot about them. But that doesn’t last. Perhaps the green workers in the orange suits prefer not to be known.