Exhibition of 100 nationalities in ‘We are Zaanstad’: “How beautiful can it be?”

The opening is a big celebration with all the people portrayed and their families. Eating and drinking is served at long picnic tables. There is also live music and dancing. Ruben walks around smiling, greets people, shakes hands and stops for a short chat. “How beautiful can it be?”, he sighs and he will repeat that several times.

Ruben got the idea through a statement by mayor Jan Hamming that no fewer than 180 nationalities live in the Zaan region. And of course the mayor is also present at the opening. With his wife Roya. “I was such a Dutch boy who managed to conquer an Iranian princess,” says Hamming in his speech, “an oriental fairy tale”. He cites a wisdom of his father-in-law. “He always said, ‘However different we are, we all live under the same sun and sleep under the same stars’.”

Love

And how did all these people end up in the Zaan region? Ruben: “There you ask me something.” Some have come here for work or have fled, but most have moved here for love. “And how beautiful is that? That people find someone in life, give up their country and live here.” A Norwegian woman came to live here for love. That love has passed, but a ‘new, better love’ came, she says.

Ruben likes to put one of the people portrayed in the spotlight: Pedro. “He is almost 70 and is from Cape Verde and has been through so much. Fled war and just survived a serious accident with a car, but he is so strong and loving. He is an example for me.”

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No sooner has Ruben finished speaking than Pedro arrives with his son in a dazzling white suit. The same suit he is pictured with. “When I first came to the Netherlands, there was a lot of snow,” he says. “I had never seen.”

Home

He has never regretted his departure and has never returned to Cape Verde. “I belong here, I feel at home here.” And that has a lot to do with the accident, says Pedro. “My son and his friend were thrown from the car, the friend died and I myself would not have survived such an accident in Cape Verde.” He was then in a coma for three months, says his son, who thinks the portrait of his father is beautiful.

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Ruben is therefore still looking for eighty nationalities. “We would like someone from Luxembourg, because it is almost a neighboring country,” he says. The artist would also find it special to photograph people from Christmas Island, from Japan, Mongolia or Papua New Guinea. You can find the nationalities he is still looking for here find. The exhibition can be seen in the Museum of Humanity on the Hembrug site in Zaandam.