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“Symptoms of COVID19: When your country seems to turn into a policestate” – Nanda Raemansky

“Symptoms of COVID19: When your country seems to turn into a policestate” acrylic on canvas 30 x 30 cm

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.

Charcoal on paper 15 x 15 cm

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.

Color tests

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.

Marker on paper 15 x 15 cm

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 ©

2 Comments
  1. Eliane Velozo

    Nanda,
    god work. I think that most countries will turn like ‘policestate’, as you
    say… and justify that is because of COViID19ç
    We will have a lot of hard work to get some fredoom back.

    1. Avatar photo
      Raemansky

      Thank you Eliane! What I see is that most countries are definetly trying to strenghten their grip on their civilians in someway. What China did to Hongkong is by far the worst example that I know of. Here in the Netherlands they are trying to nibble at our freedoms with the corona-emergency law. They want to force the people to install and activate this privacybreaching corona-app that monitors your every step. They also want to give the police the right to enter your home if they have plausible suspicion of breaching the social distancing rule of 1,5 meter. Luckily eventhough the protests against this law where mostly forbidden, the opposition didn’t take it and they removed these parts from the bill. But there are still a lot of other alarming regulations they want to impose with this law. The worst one I think is that they can addept and alter this law as they see fit to the situation, without having to consult parliament. If this law is accepted and some creep like Thierry Baudet wins the next elections, he’ll inherits this law, I don’t know what’s to become of the free Netherlands…

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