Here in the Netherlands COVID19 is pretty much under control now. Of course a second wave is to be expected, but at the moment there is not much of a thread. Black Lives Matters protests are allowed and proceeding. But there is also another protest going on right now. About a new law the government wants to create.

Because of the pandemic, they want to implement a new law, that would give the government the power the skip a bunch of constitutional rights, when there is some sort of a crisis going on, like this pandemic. This to make it easier to apply their measures, so they say.

These particular protests are banned from The Hague and Amsterdam, eventhough the BLM protests are not. One of the protests got a greenlight though, in Groningen. This is fully in the north-east of the country, remotely from the rest of the country and far away from The Hague and Amsterdam. I personally see this as an attempt of the government to shut them up.

The first protest was banned on sunday 21st of june in the Hague. The protesters didn’t accept that and a lot of them went to the Hague to protest illegally. As a result it came to a clash with the military police at central station.

There was also a woman there wearing flipflops, a short skirt and holding flowers in her hands. She looked very fragile in those clothes. She was shouting with her flowers at the police ‘We come in peace’ . She ended up with a policebat in her stomach.

When I saw this at the news, I wanted to make a work about this event. So I took a frame from a videostill and started to alter the image to make it become an image of my own . It resulted in four images and this is the first one.

Raemansky 2020 ©