In the project 'Dear Anna,' the Rotterdam writer Anna Blaman (1905-1960) acts as a motor for questions, conversations and correspondences about feminism in the Netherlands, women writing and the canon, being different, loneliness and friendship and existentialism. This is a plan by Katinka van Gorkum to delve into the writer whose work caused a lot of controversy, partly because of the occurrence of (gay) erotic passages in her work. In 1949 Anna Blaman was even summoned to a Book Tribunal on the occasion of the Book Week, in which her 'psychological incoherence and imbecility' was blamed. This mock trial culminated in an evening full of homophobia and sexism. Through Blaman, Van Gorkum wants to learn more about the development of women's and gay emancipation in the Netherlands. “I take the main theme from Blaman's work, loneliness and longing for contact, as a motive for getting to know Blaman as a person and later for exploring Blaman as a character for a story.” Where did Blaman get the courage to write as she wrote, what does it mean to "canon" someone, and when is it lawful to publish someone's personal documents?

Artist Van Gorkum is interested in the physical interior as a space for interiority. She allows her private life and art practice to merge, such as when she moved her bedroom door to an exhibition. She studied psychobiology and art history, attended the KABK and obtained a post-master Advanced Performance and Scenography Studies at a.pass in Brussels in 2019. There she started to create artificial spaces with the SketchUp design program, in which she unleashed questions about orientation and disorientation and feeling at home. In 2020 she started writing as an artist-in-residence at Stichting Bad, as the start of a study into shared spaces and lives. This is followed by 'Dear Anna'. The R&D committee thought it was a relevant application, clear and layered, and she suspects that the artist will be able to take the viewer along in the process.

In 2021 Van Gorkum had already done the necessary reading and preliminary research, step two was to build a virtual space in 2022 based on Blaman's bedroom. In it she collects correspondences, images and ideas. She will write handwritten letters with about five to ten people whose practices are related to Blaman's themes. She also begins a fictional correspondence between her and Blaman, trying to bring her world and ideas to the present. It will result in a publication, an event and a virtual environment in which she can show people around through performances. “But above all, it is an attempt to approach others in order to come closer to an answer to the question: can we really know another?”