‘Helmets Full of Stories’ shows the impact of a peace mission in works of art

The exhibition Helmets Full of Stories kicked off just before the summer on a secured military site between Arnhem and the Hoge Veluwe National Park. In a steel hangar at Deelen Air Base, the helicopters were exchanged for paintings, photographs, sculptures, tapestries and installations for one day. Magnified advertisements hung on the high outer walls of the base; soldiers with camouflage paint on their faces greeted the employees. But the Top Gun-atmosphere in the pictures of defense was not present inside. In the shed, the soldiers, partly dressed in uniform, moved modestly – among the somewhat noisier artists – through the exhibition in which they had participated.

The exhibition Helmets Full of Stories is part of a project in which young and experienced veterans are linked to visual artists. After the opening at the airbase, the exhibition moved to the Memory Museum in Nijverdal. The plan is to travel with the exhibition through all Dutch provinces.

Initiator and coordinator is naval veteran Amy van Son. “I approached the project militaristically in the beginning,” she says. “I assumed a buddy system where you have to watch out for each other, similar to what we know in the army. Artists went ‘on a mission’: in a safe environment, veterans told about their deployment, and the artists then got to work. Sometimes they were together for three to four hours when they first met.”

Unique insight

The first batch of the project resulted in twenty-two highly divergent visual works. The veterans are depicted in black-and-white portrait photos together with the artists above poignant story fragments that they shared, giving a penetrating and unique insight into the experiences of soldiers on missions.

With the project, Van Son wants to make the impact of missions on military personnel visible in a way that is understandable to civilians. “Srebrenica was 25 years ago, only now is it recognized what happened. It would be nice if we learn from that. In the meantime, the Netherlands has contributed to various UN peacekeeping missions for forty years. The need to show the impact of this on the military is already apparent from the seventy-five registrations from veterans who came in soon after the open call.”

Van Son says that she has put out the call as widely as possible: “The army, the air force, the navy, the military police and the home front are participating in the project. I also looked at different features. A cook who is stirring peas in a pan in Kamp Holland and who hears rockets flying overhead can be just as touched by a deployment as an infantryman.”

penetrating texts

In the accompanying texts next to the artworks, penetrating fragments of text by the participating soldiers follow one another. Like the painting we lost one by Mieke van Zundert. An empty chair is highlighted on the otherwise sober colored canvas; in oil she captured the first meal after the loss of a soldier. Erik Kuiper, conscripted soldier of the Royal Netherlands Army, lost a comrade from his own post during the first UN mission of the Netherlands in Lebanon. He is writing:

„(…) you got such a form right under your nose. It had to be a choice. But whether it was smart to send a bunch of 19-year-olds there… I don’t know.”

Or with a five-piece by artist Sjaak Kooij, in which he shows the theme of fatherhood and the impact of violence on children in a desert landscape. The image of a shard in an open hand is based on a memory of Kaweh Madad, adjutant and non-commissioned officer of the Royal Netherlands Army, of children in Afghanistan who played carelessly with butterfly bombs lying around. Madad served as an interpreter in Afghanistan and writes:

“When I was twelve I fled from Iran to the Netherlands with my parents and sister. With this background, it may seem crazy that you want to go on a military mission.”

It is one of the few works that shows the impact of a mission on the local population.

Army materials such as ammunition boxes, helmets, barbed wire and a sword have been incorporated into various sculptures and are more noticeable under the bright hall light at the museum set-up in Nijverdal. Several faded T-shirts that were worn during the missions and often designed by the military themselves hang on a wall. Violence is carried out with bravado on a few shirts. For example, one of the shirts shows a teddy bear with a precision rifle next to a skull with a smashed bullet with the text: “Long distance brain surgery”. Another shirt bears the sobering text: “What am I doing here anyway?”

Van Son: „People think too easily: ‘You signed up for it, to shoot people.’ That is of course not the case. And the minds of soldiers are also changing. People made their own construct about Afghanistan in their minds that now has to change again after the withdrawal.”

She continues: “Suppose you are theoretically educated and you want to do something good for the world, then you might work for an NGO such as Doctors Without Borders. If you are more practical, you will end up in the army faster. Once you are deployed, soldiers support each other, not for politics but because the person you work with becomes family.”

Rehabilitation Center

In the hangar at Deelen Air Base, veteran Edwin de Wolf, manager at a Military Rehabilitation Center, told him that the military profession is an essential part of him. “It’s not just a job. Even if you take off the suit, you remain military and your heart remains green.”

In the studio of artist Anook Cléonne, De Wolf told the story about his posting to Bosnia, where he lost his left leg when he stepped on a roadside bomb. Cléonne: „At first I thought: the world of defense and the world of art couldn’t be further apart. But it’s all about making things visible. How do you show what happens to someone after the ground is knocked out from under their feet, and how they move on after that? How do you imagine and make tangible what someone has no words for? Art is such a great tool for that.”

De Wolf says that with the unveiling of Cléonne’s artwork The map is not the terrain a lot to him. “You don’t sleep for a few nights. But no, in the process of getting there I knew no shame. And in the end, a complete stranger managed to extract images from my story.”