Who we are

Galerie de Jaloezie is a platform for audio-visual arts in Rotterdam, founded by Gijs van der Meer and Anne Vera Veen. We organise extraordinary film screenings in extraordinary settings, a yearly 48 hour film challenge and lately a pop-up gallery for video art, where we explore the boundaries between art and film. We offer a stage to young creators of audio visual arts, but also for more established makers: anyone who dares to lose herself in the work.

Due to our background in visual anthropology, we are interested in moving image that is the result of a (field)research or conceptual exploration. We believe that the intersections of social research and the aesthetic and artistic exploration of moving image is capable of transferring other knowledges, unable to be expressed by words. The indexes that audio-visual media can touch upon offer us an understanding of the world that is different from a strictly theoretical or text-based understanding. In that sense, an academic and artistic approach is included in our programmation - neither which one has the priority over the other. We take the form follows content-principle even further and look for works that transcend research insights through an experimental audio-visual form.

We attempt to move away from established categories and dichotomies in the film world such as documentary/fiction, short/feature, visual arts/cinema, entertainment/educational. Exactly in the mixtures and frictions in between these categories lie the most interesting projects.

Our search for these experimental formats is not only expressed in our programmation, but also in the settings that we create to watch and experience these works. We have experimented with different formats of watching together, that radically resist the capitalised, commodified and individualised forms that established cinema can take. Collective experience, safety and reflection is important for us.

Anne Vera Veen is cultural entrepeneur with Belgian roots. She studied Visual Anthropology, a study that focusses on the translation of research insights to experimental audio visuals outputs. Her research into a photographic archive developed into a multimedia exhibition Activating the Archive.

During this process she became more interested in the relationship between image, sound and space. This interest she further explores and shares by giving workhops in Visual Anthropology, as freelance exhibitionproducer at The New Institute and Geselschaft fur Aktuelle Kunst, as museumguide at the museum of World Cultures and as volunteer at Showroom MaMA. Anne Vera is co-founder of Galerie de Jaloezie.

During her teenage years in the scouting she was ritually assigned to Paradise Bird: “Anne Vera is proud, extravert and enthusiastic. She is not afraid to be herself and to follow her own path, but will always take care of others.” said her then sixteen-year-old fellow scouting.

Gijs van der Meer is a director, film producer and cultural entrepreneur with a background in Visual Anthropology and Urban Geography. His films are about social topics such as migration, work and social communities. In his last film, Do You See Me / Do I See You (2019), which focuses on construction workers, he investigates how physical labour and the built environment shape identities and human interactions. This film was part of the official selection of Move Cine Arch biennale Venice / Sao Paulo and the 2Rivers film festival in Koblenz. Gijs van der Meer is co-founder of Galerie de Jaloezie.

On the Couchsurfing platform he was once described as follows: “He's a chill, cool, welcoming, intelligent, experienced, just good vibe brotha. I highly recommend him.” (5/5)