Mark Rietveld (1969-2022) was best known in Antwerp for his photography in which he photographed the underground music scene and art world. At concerts, Mark always paid equal attention to what was happening on the periphery of the stage - so he also portrayed the audience and its surroundings. There came from his work a deep love for the frayed edges of the art and music world, where everyone - artists, audience, bar staff and the toilet madam - is part of it. Certainly Mark was an inseparable part of it. Incidentally, it was often silent in Mark's pictures, even if you had been there yourself and remembered razor-sharp loud and wild night.
If you visited places like Onder Stroom, Scheld'apen, Stadslimiet, Factor 44, the Tenace Boot, De Nor, AudioPlant, Minigolf Beatrijs, Forbidden City, Bar Paniek or Het Bos over the past two decades, there was a good chance you saw him wandering in front, beside and behind the stage, his camera unobtrusively at the ready, in between chatting here and there. Mark was there often, very often. He was part of the furniture he had chosen as his subject. A few days after such an evening, a careful selection appeared online, giving those absent a glimpse of what they had missed.
But those who delve further into his oeuvre will find a photographer for whom the whole world could be a wondrous subject: the archive is full of hushed moorland scenes, torn hoarfrost floors, still lifes, cats, parks in the snow, timeless figures in Prague or Paris and domestic scenes, ... Mark photographed, in short, with a great deal of love, his entire biotope.
Because it is a gigantic archive, we called on Nico Dockx, artist and researcher attached to research group ArchiVolt at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp. Someone who could scan the immense amount of images with the necessary distance to make a selection. A selection that draws lines and makes connections between all those different images, which together formed Mark's biotope.
