ROTTERDAM.- Stichting Droom en Daad (Foundation Dream and Do) has acquired the video film Ancestors by the American artist Bill Viola (1951). This work will be on display in the future in the Fenix, the migration museum that the Foundation is preparing in Rotterdam.

Movement
Bill Viola is an American video artist whose work is characterized by time and movement, spirituality and human relationships. In 23 minutes, Ancestors shows the slow approach of two people walking towards the viewer in a landscape, sizzling with the heat. The work will be given a central place in the future museum because it represents human movement and displacement and evocatively depicts the timeless and universal theme of emigrants. Viola himself says about his work:

"For me the essential basis of video is the movement — something that exists at the moment and changes in the next moment."

Viewpoint
After careful restoration of the historic warehouse by Bureau Polderman and futuristic expansion with a wide viewpoint over the river by MAD Architects, the Fenix will be the place which tells the stories of millions of migrants. From the Rotterdam quays they left for the New World, most of them via Ellis Island to the US. In the former Fenix warehouse on Katendrecht, the museum will soon be set up on 6,000 square meters for which the Foundation is currently acquiring a collection through purchases, donations, loans and assignments to artists. The Foundation works together with Ellis Island in New York and the Rotterdam City Archives. Here, thanks to financial support from the Foundation, hundreds of thousands of passenger data are currently being digitized and accessed. In the future, anyone whose family members left Europe via Rotterdam can look up information. It is now known that there are also well-known names such as Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Lee Harvey Oswald and Johnny Weissmuller.