Since 2010, the Dutch artists Martin and Inge Riebeek have collected stories from people around the world for their video art project The Essential. They ask a single question: what is the essence of your life? In three or four minutes, people tell what matters most to them. Among the stories: a woman in Naples who, as a child, saw her mother killed by bullets from the mafia and who now works in politics to combat that violence; a woman who sells coffee on the street and hopes that someday she will have enough money to go to a good dentist so she can smile at her clients and maybe find a good man; a London banker who tells how the rat race of the financial world in which he and his wife work threatens to invade their private lives; and a man in Nairobi speaking softly about his eldest son, who fell ill when he was 25 years old and died.
The project contains more than 600 video portraits of people from 23 countries. The Riebeeks continue to collect new stories, wanting to give a voice to a wide variety of people, and the stories show what is going on in the world right now, at times revealing a disturbing yet important message. The moment of the first meeting remains central: you walk on the street and meet someone who tells you his story.
The book The Essential marks a decade of that work. Published in 2020, it is a 256-page English softcover with Otastar binding, first edition of 600, ISBN 9789492051523. It offers a selection of 225 video portraits with transcripts of the monologues and additional photos taken while creating The Essential. Text interviews are by Anneke van Wolfswinkel; translation and proofreading by Joy Phillips and Michael Blommaert (The Language Collective); design by Rob van Hoesel; lithography and print by NPN Printers (NL); binding by Patist (NL).
The project has been presented in exhibitions and screenings, and new selections of videos are regularly posted online. For readers drawn to documentary practice that moves between video and the printed page, this volume is a substantial record of an ongoing archive: personal testimony, image, and sequence held together in one book.
