In September 2023, our project group gathered at the Amsterdam Museum in the Hermitage, within the Panorama Amsterdam exhibition, to experience an Art-Based Learning (ABL) session. We were guided by one of the most experienced facilitators in the field, Famke Sinninghe Damsté. Though a guidebook exists for the method, we knew that to truly understand its depth, we had to experience it firsthand. Every Art-Based Learning session is structured by the framework of four steps, which I will use to take you through a journey of my personal experience based on my notes and memory of the session.

Finding words was not easy, as my experience was quite non-verbal, visceral and emotional. Perhaps precisely because of the freeform associative dialogue with art, there is a possibility for what the sociologist Hartmund Rosa calls ‘resonance’ to occur, as the ability to engage with the world in a way that fosters meaningful interaction. Resonance relationships are inherently reciprocal and emerge through encounters with the world. In her discussion of Hartmund Rosa's resonance theory, Rita Felski describes this as “a process of becoming attuned that forms and informs one’s being in the world and that possesses bodily, emotional, and cognitive dimensions: those moments when something crackles or reverberates or comes alive.”  

I was curious: would I experience some kind of resonance in this guided ABL-session? And if so, what does it feel like?

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Step 1: Pose a Personal Question & Let and Object Pick You

My question protruded from my belly. I was four months pregnant, and the world I had known had turned itself inside out. Everything felt different. My work, which revolves around palliative care, had always drawn me close to the end of life, supporting people navigating the reality of incurable cancer. Now, I stood on the opposite shore, carrying the first signs of new life.

The contrast was dizzying. It made me think about transitions—those liminal phases where one part of life ends, and another begins. I have always been fascinated by thresholds and rites of passage.

My current research in palliative care isn’t just professional; it’s personal. It grew out of the loss of my beloved Esther when I was in my early twenties. Watching her grapple with cancer, and ultimately the final stages of her life, became my initiation into ‘the ending,’ which is also a new beginning. It’s why I do what I do.

I’ve nurtured in many ways before. I’ve been a stepmother, a godmother and auntie to nine children, and just last year, I attended the birth of my godson—a profoundly moving experience that, at the time, felt like the closest I would ever come to biological motherhood. I thought I understood motherhood from the outside, but pregnancy has me asking: Who am I as a mother in this form? And also... will the pregnancy even last to full term? Will I be able to welcome a healthy baby into the world? Life no longer feels like a straight line and so much is out of control. I find myself walking a spiraling loop, where the past whispers into the future.

I allowed my question to fade to the background wandered through the gallery, noticing all the photographs, contemporary and classical paintings, and sculptures. Nothing truly spoke to me—until I saw her: Mother Mary, the Pietà. Her eyes were hollow, damaged by the Beeldenstorm, the iconoclastic fury of the 16^th century in which mobs of Calvinist protestant crowds destroyed Catholic art in churches and public places. I almost turned away. At first glance, the weight of grief seemed too much to carry in my current state, and I tend to shy away from religious iconography in general. And yet something about her blind eyes and quiet stone presence that drew me closer. Who is she?

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Step 2: Close Reading of the Artwork

The first thing I noticed was the statue’s incompleteness—missing arms, a broken body, wrecked eyes. Yet, even in fragments, the overall form remained recognizable: the Virgin Mary mourning over the body of Christ after his crucifixion. I tried to suspend my art historical knowledge and simply see what was before me.

Her heavy veil draped over a voluminous robe with deep folds. Despite all the erosion, a delicate decorative hem lined her head covering. The stone folds were carved with such suppleness that I almost forgot they were not fabric. Tears welled in my eyes; I am not made of stone, and her posture of sorrow touched me deeply.

Her face, though damaged, still conveyed deep sorrow and compassion. The erosion and missing elements added a raw, almost haunting quality. The dark, weathered stone—likely limestone or another soft sedimentary material—had been worn down, its surface rough and uneven.

Only a portion of Christ’s body remained, his head lying prominently in the foreground. His perfectly unscathed teeth, frozen in an eerie grin. His thin, limp body, held in her fragmented embrace. His hollow eyes, hewn out with force. Missing parts.

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Step 3: Opening up Possible Worlds

As I allowed my imagination to enter the world of this work, she took me all the way back to the mountain from which this statue was once removed.
Back to cooling lava and shifting tectonic plates.
I felt the immovable silence of millions of years.
Whispering mountains.
This stone remembers everything.
The hewing into her with sharp chisels, clawed into a figure, a form—the image of a mother.

“I am an idol,” she says.

Perhaps iconoclasts did not destroy her; they liberated her from this figurative trap.  
They saw her for what she was: stone.

Strip away the face and see the rock.
Not an image of what she should be.
Faceless, with a thousand faces.
The representation crumbles, the idols smashed.

He has risen. She has sunk—down, down, down, back into the earth.  
She has seen darkness.  
She kisses worms and microbes.  
She is the undead, living under our cities, under the thin veneer of modernity.

The mother is the earth.
You can harm her, change her, but you cannot destroy her.

I am the stone—the rest of me is somewhere in the mountain. Formed by the pressures of this crust. I am always with you. This is my true face.

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Step 4: Sharing Stories

I was surprised that the heaviness of the image I had initially resisted led me not to a place of loss, but to a deeper connection with the stone itself—and with deep time. I felt the layers of uncertainty, the what-ifs of pregnancy. All the children in me, clamoring to be heard. All my mothers’ mothers’ mothers, stretching back in an unbroken line. I felt the seed of death, of mortality, that each of us is born with. The vulnerability of being alive.

I didn’t find a direct answer to my question, but something else emerged: surrender, silence, and compassion for all the beauty and violence that brought me to this moment. A connection to the three times of past, present of future. Perhaps this what resonance feels like? A quickening of the pulse, an opening of the imagination, a sense of awe and belonging that includes grief. To be alive to the possibility of death. I suddenly remember the words of  the poet Rilke:

How surely gravity’s law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of even the strongest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.
Each thing- each stone, blossom, child –
is held in place.
Only we, in our arrogance,
push out beyond what we belong to
for some empty freedom.
If we surrendered
to earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Perhaps that, too, is part of motherhood—this unfurling unknown. Learning to walk through uncertainty. Allowing life to unfold, one moment at a time. And trusting that the same tenderness and reverence I have carried for others will find its way to this new life, and to myself, as I step into this role. To find a motherhood rooted in mountains. A figureless figure behind the facade.

As I stepped out of the trance of this encounter and back into sharing with the group of Art-Based Learning participants, I found myself at a loss for words to convey the depth and breadth of the experience in that moment. Something stirred in me. Not only the unborn child, but a deep sense of knowing comes from stone's resounding stillness, even as the world is made, remade, destroyed and lost by generations of human hands.  This statue reminded me of how Rainer Maria Rilke speaks of gravity's law.

This is what the things teach us:
to fall,
patiently trusting our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.

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Postscript
On April 4, 2024—two weeks after the projected due date—we had a harrowing encounter with the fragile lines between life and death. During the final phase of intense labor, the baby's heart stopped beating during each contraction. In a swift emergency cesarean section, I was cut open, and against all odds, I welcomed a perfectly healthy child into the world. Motherhood, I am learning, is an ongoing lesson in surrender—to both gravity and grace.

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