Written by Imane Elfilali

Vesna Faassen (NL, 1987) is a photography and sculpture student at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp and is selected as one of the students of Dutch and Belgium Art Academies to show her work at the BredaPhoto International Photo Festival (13 September – 21 October).

This years theme of the photo festival is the ‘homo empathicus’. BredaPhoto seeks to go beyond today’s feelings of frustration, alienation and discontent in the financial and economic crisis. This so-called ‘homo empaticus’ is the opposite of the ‘homo economicus’, who merely values his environment in terms of individual gain. A new and caring human being emerges from the consuming and selfish world.

And that is what Vesna Faassen shows with her video project ‘Barbara’, stills of which are pictured above. The video shows the daily routine of a hotel maid from three different camera perspectives. Barbara’s work is a repetition of cleaning the same rooms and making up the same beds every single day. Barbara is the invisible guarantee of your comfort when you sleep in a hotel room. Work that is normally perceived as boring or unnoticed becomes visual and hypnotic. As a viewer and traveler you become connected with Barbara and grateful for her daily care for many anonymous visitors.

As an artist Vesna Faassen combines photography with video and creates images from a unconscious state of mind that visualise the human longing. With her background in psychology (Msc) she plays with the associative mind of the viewer. Vesna Faassen is currently based in Antwerp (Belgium).