De Koffer en het Kistje

Commissioned work for the group exhibition Puppet Masters at Museum Jan Cunen
Oss, The Netherlands

14 September 2025 — 25 January 2026

De Koffer en het Kistje is a text, sound and light work commissioned by Museum Jan Cunen on the occasion of the exhibition Puppet Masters, an exhibition focusing on puppets and their puppeteers.

A puppet called Rimple (Dutch for "wrinkle") is on permanent display in the main hall at Museum Jan Cunen (last images below). Rimple is a puppet made for Poppenheater Marag, a puppet theater founded by puppeteers and makers Margriet Pullens en Agnes Huygen in 1973 in the town of Oss, where the museum is located. Rimple was a main character in Marag's production, along with many other puppets that are not displayed alongside him.

With the support of curator Merel van den Nieuwenhof, this work mounts existing puppets from the archive of Poppentheater Marag on display in the museum nearby Rimple. Their individual characters were researched independently and with the support of Evelien Pullens, puppeteer and daughter of Margriet.

In the resulting work, the puppets are put in conversation with a Dutch script read aloud by unprofessional actors, with synchronized LED lights that illuminate their faces when they speak. In a neighboring display case, a "chorus" joins them in song intermittently throughout their conversation.

The script was developed based on Meeting of a Linden Tree / Ein Lindentreffen, a similar work from 2024. The writing was informed by a series of conversations with artists, puppeteers, and researchers Pansee Atta, Aram Lee, Ada M. Patterson, and Nadia Ihjeij. The conversations focused on their personal relationships with exhibiting their own performance costumes, objects, or puppets, and also their research on the traditions of exhibition in Western museological practice.

Annotated scripts in English and Dutch are exhibited in the same space. A digital version of this script can be read here in English and in Dutch.