When you don’t need your old documents any longer, the shredder is the best option. It will cut your documents into narrow strips so nobody can read or use them any more.

In 2013 the Dutch government decided to stop financial support to the Coin and Medal museum in Utrecht. In October of that year the museum had to close its doors. The collection of 400.000 pieces was cut up and stored on different locations. Coins with special value were donated to the DNB (Royal Dutch Bank) and a small part of archaeological artifacts with historical value were added to the collection of the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden (Royal Museum of Antiquities) in Leiden, the Netherlands. Nothing is mentioned or decided on the enormous medal collection of the museum.

With this decision came an end to a very special collection of coins, medals, related objects and the attached library. The management of a collection and the library are very important for the visibility and the context of the objects. A collection cannot exist without management and context. To cut up a collection like this destroys not only its consistency, it also destroys our national and personal history. Where can the Dutch see a real Roman coin or a Pisanello? In both museums they are not easy to be found.

Now, three years later, the databases of these two museums are still not up to date. You cannot find any images of the collection. People have to personally ask for the object to hold and see, but how do you find out if the object is really there?

The medals from the museum collection have undergone the equivalent of a shredded document on a piece of paper. This is our history; this is our reality in 2016. With this degeneration process, the Dutch government tells us that we have to move on and forget about our past, although it’s hard to believe that we have to continue separated from our grand masters. It is hard to make new work of art without the touch of history, without the smell of the museum, replaced with the fragmented absence of our historical medals.


Material:     Bronze

Size:           9 x 1 cm

Issue:         12

Year:          2016

SHREDDED