The HANDBOOK FOR THE CITY WILD is now available at book shop De Rooie Rat in Utrecht, at Het Fort van Sjakoo in Amsterdam and at PrintRoom in Rotterdam! Buy it there for €5 or order it with me by sending an email.
In July 2012 informal strategies is invited for a two month residency at Bucharest AIR in Romenia.
6 November 2011 – 26 February 2012 traces of the Meal Machine will be shown at the Volksbuurtmuseum in the context of The Grand Domestic Revolution by Casco, Utrecht.
October 2011
Video 6:50 min. - music by Matthijs van Wageningen.
Park is a short video on Cubbon Park, on of the main public green gardens in Bengaluru, India. The history of this park goes back to the colonial times - it was made by the English in 1870. The park is characterized by a great variety of local as well as exotic species. Nowadays it is, as one of the few non-privatized spaces, under great pressure of the rapid growing IT city. It is still free accessible for all citizens after successful protest against the introduction of an ID card as an entrance pass in 2008. Such a regulation would ban poor citizens from the park. In the day the park is one of the few places where you can take refuge from the overcrowded, polluted city. In the night the park gives shelter to underprivileged people and it is the terrain of sex workers and enuch.
Although it is clear that the city is about to devour the park, it seems sometimes if the wilderness is taking over its surroundings. People and stray dogs wander around between the towering trees until they suddenly disappear. Even in broad daylight the shadows can be frighteningly dark.
Video installation at the Museum Night in Delft - October 28th 2011
8 September – 11 November 2011
Kleinpolder in Beweging is a collective project in collaboration with Geert van Mil, Mette Sterre en Alex Strik and the neighbors of Kleinpolder – commissioned by housing corporation Woonstad Rotterdam.
Kleinpolder or Overschie-Oost is one of the first post war neighborhoods built in Rotterdam. It was designed and constructed in a time marked by huge lacks of housing, building materials and workers. The neighborhood was planned following the ideals of ‘het nieuwe bouwen’, a very utopian, modernist way of building.
Nowadays the apartments belong to the lowest segment of the social housing market – they are small and not very well maintained. A great part of its inhabitants has an immigrant background. Overschie-Oost is one of the neighborhoods marked as ‘problem area’ by the former minister of housing, Ella Vogelaar.
To overcome these problems the municipality of Rotterdam and housing corporations want to differentiate the housing market – the social housing is replaced by less affordable houses for young, promising families and elderly people. Such a gentrification process is often applied in Dutch cities (and cities all over the world). The aim of these processes is to improve the social and economical conditions, but the positive effect of gentrification is widely disputed. A differentiated population doesn’t necessary improve the situation of the underprivileged – only when the causes of impoverishment are taken away, the situation of these people will improve. Gentrification can only dillute the concentration of underprivileged people or move the problems to an other geographic location. A few of the main disadvantages of these gentrification processes is the breakdown of the existing social bounds and grass root initiatives in these neighborhoods and the feeling of displacement among the city residents who are again and again forced to move from one impoverished area to another.
But at the same time the situation in Overschie-Oost (or Kleinpolder) is very complex. The houses are small and not of a very good quality due to the lack of material and workers in the time of construction. Moreover these buildings are on the deconstruction list for over ten years. Most of the residents we spoke to are very eager to leave these houses, but would like to stay in the neighborhood. They are waiting, sometimes for many years, for the fee they will receive when they have to move out.
Against this backdrop we developed our project. First of all we thought it was very important to set up a different kind of conversation – a second voice to the official communication of Woonstad. By bringing 358 boxes to the area, one moving box for every apartment, we tried to make the scale of the city renewal process tangible. These boxes served as building blocks for always changing pavilions in the public space. These pavilions formed a flexible, accessible environment for meetings, games, talks and workshops.
One other tactic we used was to portray the neighbors in their apartments as if they where already long gone. In these pictures the furniture is covered with white sheets and on the couch only a shadow is visible of the apartment’s inhabitant. In order to make these eerie portraits an active element in the conversation, we stuck them on the walls of the apartment blocks.
Surf for more information to the project blog.
Tags: COLLECTIVE ACTION, DIY, URBAN PLANNING
August 2011
Expodium invited me for a research period in post-war neighborhood Kanaleneiland in Utrecht. Read about my experiences on the Kanaleneiland blog!
Tags: KANALENEILAND, URBAN PLANNING
July 2011
Edible plant scans by Doris Denekamp
A-twintig is a publication realised by the students of het snelwegatelier, a project organised by Melle Smets in colaboration with the Willem de Kooning academy and Rijkswaterstaat. The newspaper reeds as a four lane high way, and offers impressions of the different projects realised during ‘het snelwegatelier’. I was asked by Smets to lead one of the research ateliers during a camp in the middle of a highway junction in Rotterdam. The research I started there after the wilderness envelopping the highways lead to my later publication HANDBOOK FOR THE CITY WILD.
The A-twintig newspaper can be read from two sides. If you read it from front to back you get the perspective of Rijkswaterstaat and if you read it from back to front you get the perspective from the artists.
The newspaper is published by AARDSCHAP, Melle Smets in collaboration with the Willem de Kooning academy and Rijkswaterstaat.
6 July 2011
A Publication in collaboration with Noah Venezia in the context of DAI PUBLICATIONS
Texts by Maria Cecilia Loschiavo, Bert and Holly Davis and Henry David Thoreau
This publication is made possible through the generous support of Stichting Stokroos, the Dutch Art Instutute and the printing and support by Z!, Straatnieuws Utrecht and Haags Straatnieuws.
Is there still any wilderness in the densely populated, urbanized Netherlands? Are there places where the city is left to take its own course?
For this guide, I started looking for pieces of wilderness in The Hague, Rotterdam, Utrecht and Amsterdam. Wedged between highways, railways and industry, I found thin strips of untamed city. This residual space is a lot wilder than the vegetation in parks and gardens. Impenetrable bramble bushes are interspersed with mosquito bushes and overgrown fields. These residual spaces provide shelter for practices that have been expelled from the city center. There are gardens, animal enclosures pigeon fanciers and gay cruising zones. In addition, there is a variety of informal housing. People living in caravans, in sheds, in boats, in tents or huts.
As an artist I am interested in the possibilities of these margins of the city. Can these untamed areas provide examples for an alternative city? This would be a city that is not designed top-down by city planners. A city where everyone can build their own home amidst the overgrown remains of previous use. A city that is both beautiful and frightening, but never boring.
Tags: CITY FORAGING, DIY, SPACE OF RESISTANCE, USERS MANUAL
In May 2011 the Handbook for the City Wild is published in three parts in the street newspapers of Den Haag (Haags Straatnieuws), Utrecht (SN) and Amsterdam (Z!). The handbook consists of tips and tricks for surviving in the city wilderness, an edible weed guide, users manuals and texts about the margins as space of resistance.
The Handbook can be assembled following the instructions:
Tags: CITY FORAGING, DIY, SPACE OF RESISTANCE, USERS MANUAL
28 May 2011
For this month’s TOWN MEETING, we will mingle and negotiate with domestic neighbourhood practices of communal gardening, collective cooking and community art-making and ask what ways does the everyday ‘commons’ appropriate private and public spheres? Further, are the objects, relationships and spaces created from the crossings, themselves, artistic forms? How does art created in the commons, operate and generate from there?
http://www.cascoprojects.org/gdr/Meetings/May
Since Januari the Meal Machine in Casco’s Grand Domestic Revolution apartment is growing different crops. The machine is designed to grow autonomously, with an automated watering system and led lighting. But it is necessary that the crops get harvested regulary.
During the May Town Meeting a group of people harvested the crops growing in the Machine and prepared the first Meal. During this collective action we discussed how we should deal with the domestic labour from gardening to harvesting within the very immediate condition of the GDR apartment.
From the harvest we made a green soup of radish leaves and a fresh salad of endive, radish and herbs. Next to that we drank fresh mint tea with honey from Utrecht.
Tags: AVANT GARDENING, CASCO, COLLECTIVE ACTION, GRAND DOMESTIC REVOLUTION
January 2011
An ongoing project in Casco’s Grand Domestic Revolution Apartment, developed in collaboration with Arend Groosman.
This is Meal Machine, a hi-tech greenhouse that is designed to automate care, optimize plant growth and minimize waste by parasiting off of the economy of the apartment. In its discursive capacity, Meal Machine stages critical discussions on food and its production through enfolding and materializing its relations with such issues, breaking down old Western dualisms such as culture/nature. In its material capacity, the machine itself becomes a physical living entity for residents to contend with, helping to free the homestead from the misplaced nostalgia of many radical homemaker projects or avoid the deterministic and enclosing rhetoric of the ‘sustainability’ canon. In this way, the greenhouse is both an enabling and constraining ‘machine’, producing projective menus and coordinating new social rituals around its harvest cycles.
At the end of each harvest a ritual meal will take place for full consumption of the yield designed by a projective menu. This will also function as an event to invite in new seeds for its following cycle along with any proposals, adjustments and critiques for future menus and planting cycles.
Maiko Tanaka, curator of the GDR apartment
www.cascoprojects.org/gdr/Meetings/January
October 2010
Temporary research atelier on highway junction Terbregseplein – part of the educational program for the 3rd and 4th year students of the BA Fine Art at the Willem de Kooning.
I was invited by initiator Melle Smets to lead one of the highway ateliers during a four day in between the highways of Rotterdam. Together with the students I looked for the subversive potentiality of plants. Together with a field biologist we started looking for the pioneers – the plants which grow at the sides of the highways but also on the asphalt itself.
During one of our expeditons into the highway wilderness – the wild, untouched bushes in between the roads – we found the remains of a tent camp from 2005.
Tags: SPACE OF RESISTANCE
