Fenix, a new Rotterdam museum that explores immigration through art

A luggage rack carrying 2,000 bags from countries across the world welcomes visitors to the Fenix, a new Rotterdam museum that explores migration via art. The installation in question is named Suitcase Labyrinth and was created to reflect the universal nature of human displacement. For a fortunate few, such moves stem from a personal and voluntary decision, lovingly made — but for the majority of those who undergo the process, it can be painful, forced. Fenix is located in a historic port warehouse from whose site some three million people departed by ship for the United States and Canada between the 19th and 20th centuries. Their journey into the unknown with the Holland-America Line shipping company is preserved in a collection of personal objects, videos, photographs and works of art that reflect hope for a better future.

The museum, which is located in a city of 670,000 residents of 170 nationalities, features no explicit political agenda. Nonetheless, its opening, which featured the presence of Queen Máxima of the Netherlands, does coincide with the progressive strengthening of anti-immigration laws in the country, where the extreme right holds the governmental majority. Meanwhile in the United States, the Supreme Court has allowed President Donald Trump to cancel temporary residency permits for 350,000 Venezuelan migrants, who are now vulnerable to potential deportation. This is the context in which, on May 16, hours before its opening, the museum’s head of exhibition and collection Hanneke Mantel emphasized that the facility wants to share “people’s stories,” because migration is “timeless, universal and human.”

“We’ve brought together a combination of pieces, from high art to more folk art to personal objects,” says Wim Pijbes, the former director of Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum who now leads the Droom en Daad (Dream and Deed) Foundation. That organization has been a primary driving force of the Fenix, and was created by the Van der Vorm family, descendants of the owners of the Holland-America Line shipping company.

The museum is the centerpiece of the redevelopment of Rotterdam’s port, which has previously served as the city’s red-light district and Europe’s oldest Chinatown. Suitcase Labyrinth is the first stop for the building’s visitors, on its ground floor. One enters it to left, as if accessing a shipping station, and traverses aisles formed by lashed-together suitcases. From some, electronic devices hang that allow visitors to listen to the stories of the luggage’s owners. Such as that of Celine Peerenboom, who never returned after being sent to a World War II concentration camp. And that of Wijnand Tollenaar, who gambled away his family’s few belongings and out of shame, fled to the Dutch East Indies colony (Indonesia) in 1909. “We have been displaced since the dawn of humanity and will continue to be, due to love, work, war, freedom or out of the desire to go to another place,” said the Fenix’s director, Anne Kremers, at the museum’s inauguration. “In every family, there is a migration story.”

Visitors then proceed to The Family of Migrants, an exhibition that pays homage to the memorable Museum of Modern Art, New York City 1955 photography show The Family of Man. Its Rotterdam reincarnation includes 194 photographs from 55 countries. Taken by 136 photographers, they are dated from as far back as 1905 (a shot from the United States) and as recently as contemporary times (as is an image from Syria). The show features a young Spanish refugee writing a letter during his country’s Civil War, in a photo taken by David Seymour in 1936. And Manju Patel, waiting to be deported by the United Kingdom to India with his three children, in a Polaroid shot by Ian Tyas in 1979. There’s an Italian family bidding goodbye to its emigrating son, in a moment captured by Herbert List in 1959. On one of the walls, Albert Einstein gazes out, in an image from when he got his U.S. citizenship in 1940, taken by an anonymous shutterbug. Upon leaving, Mantel hopes that the public, “feels part of this family of migrants that they have contemplated.”

In the middle of the lobby, between these first two exhibitions, rises the Tornado, a double staircase with a wooden base and stainless-steel steps that form a spiral crowned by a panoramic view. It rises from the bottom of the building to well above its roof, “and there are two staircases instead of one because migration is a road, a journey, but it is not linear,” in the words of its designer, Chinese architect Ma Yansong, founder of the Beijing-based firm MAD. When Ma was invited to see the 172,000-square-foot former warehouse that was to house the museum and told of its cultural project, it seemed to him a story that was “all about movement.” His Tornado has 1.86 miles of tubing and 12,500 planks of wood, an architectural feature that appears to be suspended above the city, “a metaphor for the journeys of migrants who passed through this building,” according to its creator.

But before arriving to the Tornado’s viewpoint, one encounters the museum’s third installation, entitled All Directions: Art That Moves You. It is formed by 150 pieces, acquired over the last five years, that range from historic to contemporary art, with pieces as varied as their creators. Here stands an astronaut in search of refuge from an Earth destroyed by climate change. It is the fourth work from the ongoing Refugee Astronaut series by Yinka Shonibare, a British artist of Nigerian descent.

The exhibition also features a work by Willem de Kooning, the Dutch painter who eventually became a U.S. citizen, who left Rotterdam in 1926 aged 22, bound for New York. The piece is entitled Man in Wainscott, named for a town in Long Island where De Kooning built his studio. It has been erected in one of the museum’s windows. Alongside that window, there is an actual boat that arrived in 2022 at the Italian island of Lampedusa, with 19 people aboard. And next to that, an irregular cement wall with a mirror reflecting distortions of the surrounding pieces, created by Italian artist Vincenzo de Cotiis.

In a display case sits a Nansen Passport, a document that was issued to stateless refugees by the League of Nations between 1922 and 1938. Nearby is The Bus by Red Grooms, a life-sized recreation of a New York City bus made from heterogenous fabrics, a reflection of the metropolis itself.

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