Two Stones explores the trajectories and ideals of the Bauhaus-trained, German architect Lotte Stam-Beese and the Caribbean activist and writer Hermina Huiswoud through dialogues and appearances by contemporary protagonists. Both Stam-Beese and Huiswoud spent time working in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s and both ended up being active in the Netherlands after WWII. Two Stones was filmed in the 1930s constructivist district of KhTZ in Kharkiv, Ukraine, the first large housing project on which Lotte Stam-Beese worked, and in Stam-Beese’s celebrated 1950s Pendrecht, designed during her period as Rotterdam’s main architect/urban planner. In the 1970s, Hermina Huiswoud was agitating against the Rotterdam housing rule, which limited Caribbean Dutch inhabitants to settle in any of the city’s districts if their presence would exceed 5% of the population. Resonances as well as dissonances between the distinct trajectories of the two women and their expectation from communist ideology, are sensed through thoughts and experiences of the protagonists, who all have a personal or professional relation to the issues at hand.

Hannah Dawn Henderson is an artist, writer based in The Hague, NL.
Ievgeniia Gubkina is an architect, activist, writer based in Kharkiv, UA.
Maya Smolnyaninova is a translator based in KhTZ, Kharkiv, UA.
Ola Hassanain is an artist, architect based in Utrecht and Khartoum, SD.
Hanneke Oosterhof is the biographer of Lotte Stam-Beese based in Woensdrecht, NL.


Stills


Installation view of bauhaus imaginista, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 2019. Photograph by Silke Briel



Installtion view in bauhaus imaginista, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 2019.