Behind every door is a story. What if the battle between good and evil gains a face? What if it is waged in your mother’s face, the personification of love itself? And what if the paternalistic state gets involved? As gripping as a dramatic family novel, this book unfolds as a hybrid between an autobiographical and cultural-political quest. Artist Pedro Bakker thoughtfully illustrates the dangerous tension between love, power and powerlessness. In figurative reflections on human relationships, political relations and his own life, he tries to come to grips with our involvement in questions of guilt and innocence, precisely where the line demarcating the two becomes tremulous.

Some things are too fierce to be articulated; we are expected to remain silent about others, and sometimes we are too afraid to speak. We humans are often too small to rise to that. The artist aims to go beyond this. Visually, the artist processes a diffuse reality, at times even distorted, which seems removed from common sense. Pedro Bakker is such an artist. He does not shy away from irrationality, or from the devil on our shoulder, whose tendency towards lust, love and aggression threatens to drown us in a normlessness, which contains the threat of an egocentric turn from our compassion and our social understanding. With contributions by: Hanne Hagenaars, Jelle Bouwhuis, Freek Lomme, Laurens ten Kate and Rollergirl.