THE WORLD WILL ALWAYS WELCOME LOVERS
on-going since 2015 | diverse audio, performance and participatory works | work-in-progress

High above the hordes of stupefied tourists that shuffle through the clouds of cannabis smoke on the Oudezijds Voorburgwal, there is a vast and secret library. It is the home of over 7,000 books reflecting decades of passionate scholarship and collecting by Amsterdam professors Gert Hekma and Mattias Duyves. The library's topics are as broad as they are specific: the Marquis de Sade and his legacy; sexual liberation movements; masturbation, male prostitution, and the intersection between sex and crime. There are a few books on werewolves. There is a shelf devoted to child sexuality and intergenerational love. They have first edition copies of the earliest German sexology books. A section on homosexuality in the Muslim world. Every issue of BUTT magazine. Hundreds of biographies of queer historical figures.

Hekma and Duyves' library is the starting point of a number of artistic projects, intended to culminate in a large-scale audio piece connecting a number of private libraries around the world. A first expression of Nemerofsky's research took place June 2017 in collaboration with Amsterdam curatorial project MILK. Visitors were allowed access to Hekma and Duyves's home to experience a 30-minute audio tour of their collection. The project was launched with an event at Huis de Pinto, in which Nemerofsky discussed his research with activist and sociologist Koenraad Vermey. Nemerofsky also performed a book-wrapping action, writing the titles of books from Hekma and Duyves's collection onto specially designed screen-printed paper. Books from the Huis de Pinto library were then wrapped with this paper, migrating titles from one library into another. 

Read Artefact, a short text about Nemerofsky's research in C Magazine, no. 126, Summer 2015. 

View a photo series based on Nemerofsky's research for the Queer Networks issue of .dpi Journal. 

Nemerofsky's research into the Hekma Duyves library is supported by the Cruising the Seventies Research Group, the Canada Council for the Arts and the Edinburgh College of Art's PRE Grant programme.