The gateway as a point of encounter
2023Punt WG, Amsterdam
A collaborative exhibition between Madeleine Ruggi and María José Crespo.
Installation featuring sculpture, print, collage, sound and video created by Ruggi and Crespo.
Supported by Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst and The Eaton Fund.
The gateway as a point of encounter was a collaborative exhibition between Madeleine Ruggi and María José Crespo drawing upon the artists’ firsthand experiences visiting the Port of Amsterdam — a massive 4900-acre logistics hub handling some 100 million tonnes of international cargo traffic each year.
Gateway: A point at which freight moving from one territory to another is interchanged between transportation lines.
(Port Reform Toolkit PPIAF, World Bank, 2nd ed., 2022)
The experience of their own bodies gaining access to and being confronted with macrocosmic trading systems, territories, borders and port infrastructures was presented via Ruggi and Crespo’s separate methods of research, archive organisation and material experimentation. Ruggi and Crespo’s individual witnessing of the vastly connected world of commodity demand resulted in this collaborative body of work featuring sculpture, video, print, installation and sound.
The gateway as a point of encounter, marks a shift in Ruggi and Crespo’s previous mode of research which had centred on audiovisual presentations, such as their performance lectures at the Royal College of Art, London (2021) and Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam (2022).
Photo: Steven Maybury
Photo: Sarah Ainslie
Photo: Steven Maybury
Photos: Sarah Ainslie 
For the finissage of The gateway as a point of encounter, Ruggi and Crespo gave a public performance lecture offering insight into their research methodologies and processes of material translation, which collated image, video, sound and reading.
Photos: Steven Maybury