Responds Quickly, Friendly by Marens van Leunen

Marens van Leunen’s debut book ‘Responds Quickly, Friendly’ explores the significance of our everyday objects and domestic environments through playfully observed and staged images made in the space of her father’s home.

‘Responds Quickly, Friendly’ began in late 2022, when van Leunen’s father’s apartment in Amsterdam, which he had rented for thirty years, was sold to a new owner. Facing transition and change within their lived environment and a resulting urgency to inventory her father’s belongings, van Leunen began capturing and preserving these objects alongside the interiors of her childhood home. What emerges are carefully constructed and staged installations of his personal artifacts: from piles of chairs and paperback books; stacks of coffee mugs and Moka Pots; and tangles of hoovers and wired headphones.

“By observing, rearranging, isolating and staging my father’s objects within his house, the photographs show how belongings reflect the presence, habits and identity of their owner. Throughout the work, my father appears fragmentally through gestures or traces.” — Marens van Leunen

Playfully documenting her father’s everyday items that are soon to be packed into removal boxes, or listed and uploaded, bought and sold online, van Leunen imbues the quotidian with a renewed sense of significance. The project becomes an intimate account of a relationship between father and daughter traced through the physical objects and lived environments that they have shared. It offers a careful consideration of how our personal items become carriers of identity and markers of personal memory.

‘Responds Quickly, Friendly’ is a unique commentary on the economies of domesticity and material culture. van Leunen’s photographs sit beside a digital archive of functional photographs of her father’s objects – no longer carefully staged by the artist, but listed for online sale on Marktplaats.nl. Inter­spersed are his handwritten lists documenting his uploads and transactions. Together, the works speak to a universal experience of how we move through the world, whereby languages of listing, ranking, bidding and photographing become central to the shaping of our domestic and intimate life.