OUTSIDE ROOM 8

March 2019. Geert is suffering from abdominal pain for a while, and it’s getting worse. While visiting the toilet he has a rectal bleeding and loses two liters of blood. After a few days of research at the hospital, Geert receives bad news: he has a tumor in his colon. The doctors tell him that it can not be cured and that the cancer has already metastasized to his lymph nodes, liver and lungs. After a second and third opinion in different hospitals, the original diagnosis is drastically adjusted. The first surgery follows in April, when half of his colon is removed. He then undergoes three chemotherapy treatments and in August, in a second operation, pieces from his liver and gallbladder are removed. Geert’s cancer is genetically predetermined. His father carried Lynch syndrome and passes away in November of the same year Geert is treated for his colon cancer. When Geert was first diagnosed with cancer, Lotte, his friend, asked if she could make a portrait photograph of him, ‘pure’, without the presence of poisonous medicine in his body. That became the start of a project called 'Project C.', in which they choose analogue photography to represent the three most common cancer treatments: chemotherapy, radiotherapy and surgery. Lotte Bronsgeest [L] and Geert Broertjes [G] both graduated in 2013 at the Fotoacademie in Amsterdam. For this book they collaborated with graphic designer Teun van der Heijden [T] who interviewed them about their process.