Salon d’Amour by conceptual artist Margret Wibmer is a deeply moving and immersive performance that engages the public as active participants and reimagines love as a force of transformation.
Image:Salon d’Amour by Margret Wibmer, 2025 at The Merchant House Amsterdam, 4th & 5th July 2025. Mask wearer during performance; with a work by Julian Opie from the collection of the London- and Amsterdam-based collector and sustainability entrepreneur Christopher Springham FRSA. Photos/stills from video by Anastasia Nefedova.
The realisation of Salon d’Amour at TMH was generously supported by AFK – Amsterdam Fund for the Arts, the Iona Stichting, and the Austrian Embassy in The Hague.
Salon d’Amour started out in a theatre in Eindhoven in 2016, was performed in a former ballroom in Austria in 2023, in a vacant Samrai house in Kanazawa, Japan in 2024 and last weekend it was performed at The Merchant House Amsterdam (TMH) located in a 17th-century canal house.
Conceived by multimedia artist Margret Wibmer, this performance and long term project engages the public as actors. The unique masks developed by Margret Wibmer together with a curated selection of poems, love letters and texts by renowned artists and writers, serve as conduits for engagement, inviting us to reimagine love as a force of transformation, capable of reshaping our relationship with one another and the world around us.
Set within a carefully orchestrated space, participants are guided through an intimate journey— a world of beauty, ambiguity and imagination. As readers read from the manuscript to their masked counterparts, their voices , carried by Poss’s evocative soundscape, flow like a river through various historical times, shifting geographies, and ephemeral encounters, engaging a multitude of perspectives, cultures and worlds.
Photographs / stills from video” Anastasia Nefedove. 2025
I am deeply grateful to everyone who contributed to the realisation of my performance in this magnificent setting.
My heartfelt thanks go to Marsha Plotnitsky, founding artistic director of TMH, for her generous support and vision; to collector Christopher Springham who supports my work with unwavering enthusiasm; and to Anastasia Nefedova, independent curator and photographer/videographer, for beautifully capturing my masks and the performance.
I would also like to express my sincere appreciation to my wonderful and dedicated team of performance assistants: Ingrid Chaves, Natisa Jones, Freya van Assem, Cinta Janssen, Dilruba Tayfun, Lara Francis Kok, Emily L. Haggith, Dario Lobozzo, Lou Etoundi Menanga—your presence and commitment made all the difference.
Special thanks to Robert Poss for his evocative soundscape; Ivo van Stiphout for sound technique; to Saskia Monshouwer for the Dutch translations of the manuscript; Marianna Maruyama and Mohamedou Ould Slahi for their contributions to the manuscript; and to PEACH Wien for the design of the manuscripts and the posters developed for my performance at TMH.
The posters, available at TMH, thoughtfully reflect the performance’s complexity, offering a visual language that mirrors its emotional and conceptual depth.
