Memory in Motion
The Fenix Museum, Rotterdam
At Rotterdam’s docklands, a new museum has opened its doors last month. FENIX is a museum of migration, holding space for movement, identity, and memory in motion. Housed in a former harbour warehouse and crowned by an iconic spiralling “Tornado” by architect Ma Yansong, the museum is a vessel for storytelling, crossing borders, and collective wayfinding.
Rather than offering a singular narrative of migration, FENIX has layered voices, cultural objects, and fragments of memories. It becomes a museum of immense feeling: sacrifice and joy, belonging and departure, resilience, and reconstruction. The exhibition takes you on a dimensional journey through diverse stories and mediums, weaving together themes that reflect the migrant experience.
As a complex and layered subject that transcends borders, the works investigate the concept of home, identity, and time by immersing the visitor in an empathetic portrayal of global migration's past, present, and future.
As climates shift, borders blur, and global inequity continues to displace millions, migration is no longer an exception but a story of our time. FENIX is a mirror, a question, and a point of departure. It invites us to think: What does it mean to belong? Who gets to arrive, and how can we build a world that embraces the future of human movement?
FENIX allows the migrant experience to swell, loop, and speak in many voices. The stories told are deeply human and relatable. Themes of inclusion and exclusion, sacrifice and resilience are embodied in the works displayed.
Visit the FENIX website here
Below, we explore some of the projects on show at the exhibition and take a look at the exhibition at the Nieuwe Instituut, which explores the work of Fenix’s architect, Ma Yansong.
Maze of suitcases left by migrants who came to Rotterdam.
The Bus by Red Grooms
The Bus is a soft, surreal version of New York City compressed into a life-like bus. It examines the city's identity as a place where cultures converge and passengers become portraits of urban life. Grooms, an American artist, created the life-like sculpture with playful materials, foam, leather, fabric, and wood, to build a cartoonish, tactile world. It is a joyful and chaotic reminder that cities are built on cohabitation, spontaneity, and shared journeys. See more here
“My bus is not made out of metal, it is made out of fabrics. So I think you are entering the world of imagination. ”
“Past migrations echo alongside future ones, honoring not only those who came before, but those still to come. It gestures toward a horizon of shared recollection.”
In Our Real Life (Waves)
by Jason Hendrik Hansma
Pakistani artist Hansma created a haunting film that stitches amateur footage of flooding from across the globe. With a hypnotic soundtrack by Dominican producer Kelman Duran, the work unravels climate change as a present condition (and not just a future threat). It erases national borders, engulfs cities, and merges the natural with the manmade. This piece sends a lingering message. If migration is the future, water may be the greatest mover (for climate migrants). See more here
We, In The Eye of the Wind by Chae Eun Rhee
South Korean artist Chae Eun Rhee creates a dreamlike, six-panel migration through time and space. Her narrative arc from sunlit mornings to wintery nights glides past digital influencers, migratory birds, and Koreans on a Hawaiian holiday. Through these shifts, Rhee positions migration as a timeless, shape-shifting phenomenon that is not limited to geography but rather unfolds through seasons, screens, and generations. See more here
“I wanted to show migration more as an emotional state than physical movement.”
“I don’t come from traditional Africa, but from modern Africa”
Rotterdam Skyline Wigs by Meschac Gaba
Beninese-Rotterdam artist Meschac Gaba turns Rotterdam’s urban architecture into sculptural wigs. Inspired by Afro hair salons in Harlem and traditional practices in Benin, the wigs are connected to a human identity, humoursly and poetically embodying the city as a lived-in experience. The synthetic hair pieces are vividly connected to beauty, memory, and place. See more here
The Family of Migrants
This exhibit is located on the ground floor. Part of the emotional core of FENIX lies in this exhibition, an installation of 200 photographs that document migration from 1905 to 2025. These portraits capture departure, travel, and arrival across 55 countries. You are face-to-face with strangers who feel somewhat familiar to you, through their eyes of hope, fatigue, joy, and fear. The collection offers not a single narrative, but a shared experience. It reminds us that it is almost everyone today knows someone who has moved, fled, or sought something better.
“Modern buildings are social products”
Ma Yansong & Architecture as Emotional Landscape
Above these projects lies a spiralling structure, dubbed the “tornado”. Designed by Yansong of MAD Architects, the observation deck is a philosophical gesture. At the Nieuwe Instituut, we got a closer look at Ma’s values for design. Ma, known for his organic and emotive design gestures, rejects modernism’s cold rationality. He instead draws from traditional Chinese notions of “shanshui” 山水 (mountains and water) to imagine architecture as intuitively connected to nature and deeply human.
Sketching by hand, he sees buildings as emotional landscapes. According to him, a good city is one that can take the migrant workers’ needs into account (since they built it). The tornado is a metaphor for movement, cycles, and a meandering path for people to restore a spiritual and emotional resonance.
