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086 Issue # 11/11 : PublIc Issues
arises from a necessity to draw from and merge different disciplines and
perspectives from many voices.
Often you are asked to develop projects that accompany urban plan-
ning. For example the Dwaallicht (2007) project in Rotterdam. In your
experience, what expectations do the cities or developers have about you
as an artist?
Often the expectations of the developers are their own immediate interests
in executing an urban redevelopment or master plan with as little friction
as possible with the involved parties, such as the local population,
inhabitants, shopkeepers, and other users. The hope an art project will
smooth the process and ease the pain. (fig. 3) Like in the Nieuw Crooswijk
area in Rotterdam, where a massive regeneration took place, tearing down
more than 90 percent of the social-sector dwellings and replacing them
with middle-class residences, which displaced 90 percent of the residents,
mainly working-class people from a whole range of ethnic backgrounds.
They basically asked for a project of nice saying goodbye events. When I
accept engage such a commission, it is because I feel an urgency to
address precisely the formulation of the commission and the implied posi-
tion of the local inhabitants. I try to create a more radical narrative
from within. I know this implies the risk of my being completely co-opted
by the commissioning body. This is why I always also try to break open
the commission by arranging independent funding and co-commissioners.
And what are the interests and aims you have when becoming
involved in such projects?
I aim to create platforms of exchange that bring together all urban
forces, thereby enabling the development of places where intimate social
and formal situations can meet. From this exchange, and through meeting
and confrontation, I envisage a more broadly supported and comprehensive
idea of living together in an area. As it is precisely at this moment
that a community begins to shape itself, begins to articulate its own voice
and aesthetic, and begins to organize itself, it becomes clear that it
knows what it actually wants with its environment. At such a moment, you
will see people rising up and demanding the right to the area.
areas?
What do you think is most often forgotten when planning new urban
Most new urban areas, and IJburg outside Amsterdam comes to mind as an
extreme example, are devised completely on a drawing board. The amount of
planning done is intense, and the future of its inhabitants is often
charted for more than 20 years, calculated around the increasing amounts
of people that will come to live there and building services for them
when certain population metrics are met. I think that these areas lack
space for the unplanned, the yet to be desired. They lack space for
people who move into such overregulated places to try to make them their
own, to establish a habitat that might differ from the planners' original
intentions.
The Blue House on IJburg tried to be such a place, one that offers the
opportunity to express these frictions, to match local desires with
external imagination, and to intervene in these processes of accustomization.
On an island that has become almost fully privatized, it is
one of the few public places that can give voice to the struggles of an
emerging community. (fig. 4)
Your projects, such as Face your World, StedelijkLab Slotervaart
(2005) in Amsterdam, where you designed the plans for a park together with
the local residents, often try to engage the inhabitants. In your ex-
perience, which factors are needed for people to be willing to actively
participate in such processes?
To be able to create with and from within the community, my projects
depend on the community for their sustainability. For the work to become
more than my single ownership, but the collective ownership of everyone
involved, it is essential for the projects to step into the community
and become part of them, and to develop the ability to listen to how to
interject my creative energy. For this you simply have to spend time,
3 — Dwaallicht (Will o the wisp)— The knight of
memory, 2007, Rotterdam, Nieuw Crooswijk. Photo:
Roger Teeuwen
4 — Het blauwe Huis (The blue House), 2005-
2010 — Pump up the blue by Herve Paraponaris, 2008,
Amsterdam, Ijburg. Photo: Ramon Mosterd