An onion with a blue headband, Marge Simpson, a cat and Japanese manga – digitalised portraits inspired by Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring swirl around the walls. They are part of a new show at Fabrique des Lumieres in Amsterdam, where high art becomes an “immersive experience”.

In November 2022, the Mauritshuis in The Hague called on people worldwide to provide the museum with a replacement for the Girl with a Pearl Earring to make up for her short stay in Amsterdam as part of the largest Vermeer exhibition in history.

Nearly 3,500 people submitted their versions of the girl to the Mauritshuis, and 128 of them appear in the video, a seven-minute sidebar to the Fabrique’s Dutch Masters’ show in the capital’s Westerpark.

“We don’t know her name, her age, who she is, we’ve no idea,” said Mauritshuis director Martine Gosselink at the premier this week. “She could be one of Vermeer’s daughters or a girl from the street. Or maybe she never existed at all… but her popularity knows no boundaries.”

Dorien van den Bosch brought her tiny crocheted girl to the premiere. “I didn’t really have a thing for the painting until I started, but the more you look, the more you see,” she says. “What colour is her jacket, for example. Or her hair. And she has no eyebrows.” Van den Bosch opted to give her girl a pair of trousers and golden boots.

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The compilation also includes an extravagant drag version of the girl, put together by Ryantino Monroe when he was competing in Drag Race Holland. “We had to make a costume using the Netherlands’ two biggest exports,” he says. “I went for the girl, and gave her an ecstasy pill as an earring instead.”

It took the production team nearly six months to complete the compilation, the first-ever Fabrique experience to be made outside France. The 80 square metre space involves dozens of projectors with a soundtrack carefully edited to match the different versions of the girl on view.

The ode to the girl is a way of lowering the threshold to enjoying art, says the Fabrique’s Patrick Alders.

The Dutch cultural sector is facing headwinds at the moment, he said, referring to the right-wing government’s plan to increase value-added tax on more highbrow cultural events from 9% to 21% next year.

Whether the Fabrique’s productions are considered art (21%) or cinema (9%) is not yet clear. Whatever the outcome, “this sort of alliance [with the Mauritshuis] is a good way to strengthen the links between us,” he says.

The first #mygirlwithapearl project has been so successful, the Mauritshuis is hoping to put together a second compilation.