Dasarts magazine en

talkINg WIth

placEs DasArts magazine 2014 / 2015

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Talking with Places

INDEX

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Editorial Barbara Van Lindt 6

You Still Haven’t Looked at Anything Chris Keulemans 14

In the Distance K. Schippers 17

Students Explore Unchartered Territory 44

The Tip of An Iceberg Sébastien Hendrickx

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Amsterdam North in Numbers

DasArts

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Never Free of Idealogy

Master of Theatre

Barbara Van Lindt & Karin van de Wiel

Open Weekend Friday 16 January 2015 / 20:00 Saturday 17 January 2015 / 14:00 - 23:00

Thursday 22 January 2015

Master prOOf prOjects Monday 2 February 2015 Tuesday 3 February 2015 www.facebook.com/dasartsmasteroftheatre

www.dasarts.nl

Image: Preparation - Agustina Muñoz / Photography: Thomas Lenden

deadline fOr applicatiOns

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Recommended 62

DasArts & Colophon

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Talking with Places

EDItorIal text bARbARA VAN LINDT

The North is actually the new centre. In any case, it is a midpoint of experimentation, a magnetic field of influence

The North was tipped in various international media as one of the ‘most booming city districts in the world’ in the spring of 2014. But not until the summer did this part of the city become visible on official tourist maps. Before that, the North was a large, off-white spot on the map with not a single interesting landmark for visitors. What I also notice is that when I talk about our new location, I always mention the point of the compass, something which I never did when we were located in Amsterdam East.

In a short period of time, ‘moving to Amsterdam North’ has become equivalent to the desire to reinvent oneself. It takes courage to turn your back on the centre of Amsterdam; you have to defy the physical and mental distance of the waters of the IJ. You go to the North to explore new areas, or to breathe new life into undeveloped terrains. In the past five years, the North has unmistakably changed because of this, gaining an identity as strong as a top commercial brand. It is a small, proud republic, a gold mine of forgotten stories, a haven for artists, a place where innovation and entrepreneurship have become the buzzwords of a renowned gentrification scenario.

The North is actually the new centre. In any case, it is a midpoint of interest and experimentation, a magnetic field of influence. DasArts is part of this and considers it research terrain. What position should we take here? With whom should we work? To what should we contribute?

At a time when artists are experiencing both a growing necessity and a growing pressure to relate their practice to their surroundings, these questions are particularly relevant. In collaboration with Willemijn Lamp and Sébastien Hendrickx, mentor Chris Keulemans put

together a programme in which we became acquainted with a tremendous diversity of people, places and networks in the North. At the same time, the participants explored a variety of artistic strategies for relating to places and people as an artist.

After the visit by guest lecturers John Jordan, Jozef Wouters and Simon Allemeersch, the introduction of terms in order to convey both resistance and enthusiasm and the accompanying discussions, we drew up a list on a Friday afternoon. A list of things that we as artists could do in the North. You could…

• purposely undo gentrification through vandalism, guerrilla actions and tagging; • organize a social intervention for the wealthy; • ignore gentrification; • do what you like; • look to the future instead of the past; • focus on one person in the neighbourhood; • dream up a cultural cult phenomenon that is typical of the North; • give a performance with mermaids on the IJ; • organize an event to celebrate the gentrification of the North and ask all parties involved to make a toast to the future for each other.

Barbara Van Lindt (Belgium, 1966) has been managing director of DasArts since 2009. Prior to that, she had been involved as a student advisor, but gained most of her experience in the professional arena, with a special focus on internationally-oriented performing arts as programmer for Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels, 2006-2009). At the Gasthuis Theater (Amsterdam, 1997-2001) and wpZimmer (Antwerp, 2002-2006), she created and directed workplaces for emerging artists in the fields of theatre, performance and dance.

The last contribution to this list was my own. I wonder if the students are still working on their ideas on the list, but in any case, mine keeps running through my head.

Something to actively organize after Talking with Places is over, because the conversation with the North has just begun.

1. Gentrification refers to shifts in an urban community lifestyle and an increasing share of wealthier residents and/or businesses and increasing property values.

Location: DasArts, Havikslaan 20

Photo: Thomas Lenden

DasArts has moved. We have found temporary accommodations in an old school building until we move again next year, along with several other departments of AHK and de Theaterschool, into our permanent quarters in a former laboratory of oil giant Shell. Both buildings are in Amsterdam North.

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Photo: Thomas Lenden

You still haven’t looked at anything text Chris Keulemans

‘Note down what you can see. Anything worthy of note going on. Do you know how to see what’s worthy of note? Is there anything that strikes you? Nothing strikes you. You don’t know how to see. You must set about it more slowly, more stupidly. Force yourself to write down what is of no interest, what is most obvious, most common, most colourless... You still haven’t looked at anything, you’re merely picked out what you picked out long ago. Force yourself to see more flatly.’1 Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces

Chris Keulemans ((Tunisia, 1960), mentor of this block, is a writer of fiction and non-fiction. His latest novel is The American I Never Was. To study the role of art after crisis, he has travelled to Beirut, Jakarta, New Orleans and Sarajevo. During the nineties, he was director of De Balie, a centre for culture and politics in Amsterdam. He was the founder and artistic leader of the Tolhuistuin, a new arts centre in Amsterdam North.

Location: Writing Quarters, Tolhuistuin

In 2008, I moved to Amsterdam North in order to set up a new art centre there. I learned how to put together a team without falling back on familiar faces, to negotiate a renovation with people who can see the value of a building but not that of people, to raise funds at a time when the traditional subsidy system was making way for other types of financing, to distinguish between good and bad ideas in their very early stages; and I came to understand that creating a space also means that you have to create space for the ambitions of other people. In the end, it all worked out. The Tolhuistuin is a fact. All of Amsterdam is welcome there. Then I gave myself permission to move on - after all, the place is not mine; it belongs to everyone.

small scale and in reality. Unemployment in a blue-collar neighbourhood that still hasn’t recovered from the closing of the shipyards and factories. Immigrants who haven’t found the possibilities they expected but nevertheless are building up a life which offers their children a future. A government which has had to abandon numerous social responsibilities while entering new alliances with housing corporations and project developers in order to put the neighbourhood on the map. Large families in small houses. People whose horizon stops at the end of the street.

People with memories of palm trees, deserts, mountains and wars. Bars with the music of Hazes, teahouses with Fairuz, festivals with Pharrell, parks with Bach.

In the meantime, I explored the North. If you want to open your doors, you have to become acquainted with your neighbours. So I began wandering through a city district of 90,000 people that had been ignored by the rest of Amsterdam for years. The waters of the IJ formed a mental barrier for both sides. I encountered everything that we know from the headlines in the media, but then on a

I was a traveller in my own city, looking for something I didn’t know about yet, something that didn’t immediately stand out. And for lovers of the nondescript, the North is a paradise. A slapdash montage of old houses on dikes and public housing flats, shadowy warehouses and charming garden villages, strung together by barren squares, streets with ordinary stores, abandoned business terrains.

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We were intent on focusing our gaze outward, in sharpening our image of the reality. In order to look well, see nothing special, and look even better

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Talking with Places Photo: Thomas Lenden

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We went out on the streets, met up with active Northerners, old and young, learned about the history of the area and its transformation over the past few years, all the while talking about how artists can respond to a new environment like this, which at first sight has nothing special to convey but little by little proves to be a playing field for all of the economic, political and social developments that occur in a typical European city. We were intent on focusing our gaze outward, in sharpening our image of the reality of all these places and faces around us as artists. In order to look well, see nothing special, and look even better.

But then what do you see? Old working-class neighbourhoods that are in danger of having to make way for expensive apartments and for the creative industry that is so eager for cheap space on the edges of the city centre.

And where does that leave you as an artist? The young DasArts theatre-makers immediately realized that they do not have the reins in hand here but are in danger of becoming players in the scenario that Thomas Frank described in The Baffler:

Sometimes it makes you despondent. Your gaze ricochets off everything. Until you come nearer, start to look more slowly. Stop ignoring passers-by and notice them. Get into conversations. Hang around and become addicted.

Because you discover all of that concrete, glass and brick indeed means something to the people who spend their days here, with all of their customs and stories that had been hidden behind the lace curtains and the flowerpots, people who gradually stir themselves and now are all around you.

Focusing our gaze outward In the middle of that neighbourhood, DasArts found new, temporary quarters in an old school building on the Havikslaan this past summer. ‘Help us land in the North,’ said Barbara Van Lindt. So I became a mentor, with Willemijn Lamp and Sébastien Hendrickx as co-mentors. We called the block Talking with Places, with the idea of discussing context-specific theatre with the 12 new students who had come from across the world to study here – and unsuspectingly had ended up in Amsterdam North.

‘We build prosperity by mobilizing art-people as vibrancy shock troops and counting on them to... well... gentrify formerly bedraggled parts of town. Once that mission is accomplished, then other vibrancy multipliers kick in. The presence of hipsters is said to be inspirational to businesses; their doings make cities interesting and attractive to the class of professionals that everyone wants. All a city really needs to prosper is a group of art-school grads, some lofts for them to live in, and a couple of thrift stores to supply them with the ironic clothes they crave. Then we just step back and watch them work their magic.’2 I have nothing against art-school grads in ironic clothes.

But this scenario always kept me on guard during the years in which I built up the Tolhuistuin and discovered the North – I think it’s important not to ignore the people who seldom play a part in this process, the people who are already living in the ‘bedraggled parts of town’, and often have been for generations, people who also understand that there’s a game going on that is bigger than themselves, and who do not have a platform to make themselves heard before having to clear the field. Without them, the story is incomplete: if you make yourself too important, you ignore the people who were there before you, the people who wear their clothes without irony, who have shaped the place in such a way that you could come and discover it. Without having become acquainted with the Northerners, I would not have been able to become one myself. Without the Northerners, the Tolhuistuin could have been situated anywhere.

The solidarity in this blue-collar district which has been left to its own devices turns out to be so deeply rooted that it is infectious

Chris Keulemans (seen from the back) and three DasArts students (rtl Astrit Ismaili, Noah Voelker and Eleana Alexandrou) tell about the block Talking with Places on Radio Futura, which directly broadcasted a series of discussions on art and the world from Frascati in September

Do-it-yourself locations Amsterdam North is not a Williamsburg or a Bushwick.

In New York, artists settled in certain neighbourhoods of Brooklyn because there were vacant buildings there, and a network of no-budget, do-it-yourself locations for artistic experiments has developed over the past 10 years. But this enthusiasm has not spread to the blacks and Latinos who already were living there. In her essay ‘Brooklyn’s Experimental Frontiers – A Performance Geography’, Jasmine Mahmoud exposes this world within a world.

‘It’s as if Bushwick’s 10 percent white demographic made the neighborhood into a frontier, an imaginative blank slate on which to stage new work. It is as if the nonwhite population of Bushwick allowed white artists to disidentify with other populations in the neighborhood and produce art that does not engage them.’3 The result, writes Mahmoud, is ‘a placeless style’ – a form of radical art that emerges somewhere because cheap space is available, but is not rooted in the neighbourhood itself and thus can easily move on again when the pioneering work has led to the prices of real estate becoming unaffordable.

Many young artists are coming to the North, too, attracted by affordable living accommodations and working spaces. But here, they often immediately start learning about the existing communities, the character and history of the neighbourhood. As if they understand that their work will not maintain a footing here if it is not understood. That requires a certain selflessness, unusual amongst artists who are still busy developing their signature. The awareness of a correspondence between your own means of survival and that of the people around you produces a culture of solidarity. No matter how different the basic principles and conditions are between someone who sees art subsidies falling away and someone who is deeply entangled in debt assistance programs, the solidarity in this blue-collar district which has been left to its own devices turns out to be so deeply rooted that it is infectious. It leads to a form of art that is investigative and stratified, as it is comprehensible on different levels at the same time. How could it be otherwise, when your neighbours are both your source of inspiration and your audience?

DasArts - Master of Theatre

Talking with Places

Hanging Garden by Ahmed Khaled. Location: Voedseltuin, Noordwal 1

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The first outlines of an alternative This kind of work is about sharing rituals and doubts but also confidence. It keeps you from capitulating to a system of institutionalized exclusion and turning inward, in your own living room, limiting your horizon to the end of the street, staying in your own studio where you develop a language that fades away as soon as you walk outside.

Tim Vermeulen, from the online platform Notes on Metamodernism, describes in Frieze the possibilities that then arise:

This is about sharing rituals and doubts but also confidence

Comprehensibility is what emerges when you find a steady tone, when you express yourself distinctly, clearly and honestly in order to communicate the essence of your work. As such, you present your work on a level where it can be received, where it does not cloak itself in uncertainty and diffuse questions, but opens a discussion.

And thus becomes a proof of our interconnectedness, the connections we need in order not to be thrown apart into separate little individuals, who on their own cannot counterbalance the neoliberal market that thrives when we all consider ourselves individual consumers.

Take Ariadna Rubio Lleó. Member of the much praised, hyper-physical mime ensemble Schwalbe and since having moved to the North, also involved with Theaterstraat, a collective of young theatre-makers who are investigating ways in which to make their work understandable and engaged without ending up as conventional community art. Once a year, Ariadna makes a production with residents of the North by bringing their codes and rituals of movement to the theatre. She began with an association of line-dancers; after that, six girls from a judo club and now she is making a production with eight dogs and their owners. The result is enchanting for the audience and empowering for the participants and their supporters.

‘The artist produces art works. The artist also produces a particular kind of space: a space that may be an area or a studio, isolated or entwined with a community, but one that appears to allow for creative agency and represents to the public a kind of freedom to do what you want. The artist also produces a time that is productive but does not necessarily adhere to the schedules associated with capitalist production (the kind of flexible economy that is, in fact, the bread and butter of our current financial system). So the part of a city re-appropriated by the artist – or rather, the urban space and time produced by that artist – introduces a rhythm of the everyday that appears playful, like a game of skipping; it allows people to join in at their own pace, and participate in the creation of the game.

What makes this discussion difficult is that it has become so hard for us to think beyond the current financial system, beyond the idea that something is worthwhile only if it can be measured along mathematical scales and graphs, reduced to a market value.…

But just because we cannot instantly think of a viable alternative to the current financial system or political apparatus, does not mean there are no alternatives. The task for artists today, it seems to me, is to try and think the impossible possibility of an alternative with the tools and materials we have at hand.’4

‘We need to change the way we think about scale.

We should act locally AND globally.’

John Jordan

John Jordan (France, 1965) co-founded the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, that exists somewhere between art and activism, poetry and politics. He co-created the book/film about utopian communities in Europe: Les Sentiers de l’Utopie, with Isabelle Fremeaux. Jordan formed the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army, a methodology that merges clowning and direct action. He was co-director of the social art group Platform and worked in the infamous collective Reclaim the Streets.

As part of Talking with Places, John Jordan gave the public lecture The Tracks of Utopia. He was also guest speaker in the three-day programme Art in the Real World.

If the students succeed in presenting the first outlines of such an alternative and share it with their new neighbours, then this block will have been a good step – and DasArts will have shown that it is a school that, particularly because of its move to the North, is more than a link in the chain of a dominant system but instead an initiator of the discussion that our art and our cities need.

1 Perec, G., ‘Species of Spaces and Other Pieces’. Penguin Classics 2008. / 2 Frank, T., ‘Dead End on Shakin’ Street’.

The Baffler no. 20 (2012). / 3 Mahmoud, J., ‘Brooklyn’s Experimental Frontiers – A Performance Geography’. In: TDR: The Drama Review 58:3 (2014), pp 97-121. / 4 Vermeulen, T., ‘Changing Places – a roundtable with Nils Norman, Timotheus Vermeulen, Anton Vidokle, Sharon Zukin and Dan Fox (ed.)’.

In: Frieze, nr. 148 (2012).

Photo: Karin van de Wiel

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In the Distance You gave something on loan, you’d like it back whether a book or drawing straws, you won’t get them, so conclude: let it be.

Whether binoculars or a portable radio.

It makes no odds. A balance has come about between the loan and its absence from home. The borrower moves to Buenos Aires, takes the radio and listens to local stations, or otherwise he gazes through the binoculars at the mountains that now seem within reach.

And suppose you had been given the book back, Mathijs the wildcat child,

by A. Hamaker-Willink, ‘if only things had remained that way, but they did not, oh just this time no’. Though it wasn’t far away, you still lost the space between yourself and your possession. If the silver drawing straws from

Café Trianon are returned after all, loan them out again, seek another direction who knows – Helsinki. The same goes perhaps for everything.

The glass of water set far away from you, forty metres, a kilometre? The personal documents, indiscernible on the horizon. The brooch for your lover, lost in the immensity.

The thimble in Singapore, the picture book of Flipje disappeared in a residential tower, you can no longer find the golden fountain pen in the beach house.

As such your possessions dwindle across seas and mountains, you lend, you lose, it’s all out of reach, so you let it go. It has already been collected across the world, and why let those passing distances contract within a house.

As part of Talking with Places, The Dutch poet K. Schippers (1936) gave a guest lecture at DasArts

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Unchartered Territory

‘Observing and engaging with the world, “being with the other” without either needing or wanting to own or control the situation, creates a poetic mental space that, once in a while, makes the world magnificent.’ Michael Kliën Michael Kliën (Germany, 1973) is a leading voice in contemporary choreography. His artistic practice encompasses interdisciplinary thinking, critical writing, curatorial projects, and centrally, choreographic works equally at home in the Performing Arts as in the Fine Arts. He was co-founder and has been Artistic Director of the London-based arts group Barriedale Operahouse (1994-2000) and Artistic Director/CEO of Daghdha Dance Company (2003-2011).

As part of Talking with Places, Michael Kliën gave the public lecture The Crash Out of Civilization and Into the World: Choreography as Aesthetics of Change and put together the substantive programme for the students’ ‘embedment’.

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Photos Thomas Lenden

Dear all, I send to you a little text about the embedment – more of a mental attuning device than anything else.

The week’s work is informed by personal embedments into social contexts other than our everyday Umfeld, cultivating our perceptive frames to extend beyond our socially choreographed reality. By attending to the Other with an ‘absolute gaze’ – an initially ‘disinterested’ self – the primary task of the embedment is not to understand, to gather, to build or to bring forth information.

The task is to empty oneself, to take in, to be radically open to possible other worlds, to provide a resonance body for one’s own thought processes to expand, become enriched by the Other in myriad ways and for new thinking to emerge at its proper pace.

Hence, the week is not dedicated in any way to the suppression of pressing ideas, theories or projects that one might be working on, but to taking a different route realizing them.

Looking forward to entering the unchartered territory of the week,

Photo: Karin van de Wiel

Michael Kliën

Unchart

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This Must be the Place Facing Reality: A Tableau Where am I now? I, too, have decided to leave my home, following in the footsteps of so many, to find my way in Amsterdam. This time Amsterdam North, not the familiar East – like during my first year at DasArts. A foreigner lost in a place he doesn‘t know can feel at home only in the anonymity of a place which speaks the language he is able to understand. This must be the place – even if I keep asking myself if there isn‘t a better one – for now!

So, here I am in the North, standing still and taking in all the information, all the noise, all the things. This place constitutes the only reality for me right now. I am completely motionless. I don‘t want to move, and am not sure if I could move, even if I wanted to. I am just standing here for a very long time, becoming a constant in a spinning world of ongoing change.

I start loosing my connection to time. How long have I been standing here? The outlines of my view start to blur. I try to cancel out all the information, all the noise around me. But I fail. My senses even become sharpened by the lack of movement. And while all these tourists are passing by, I stare in the direction of the EYE. This huge monument of gentrification. A beautiful building, I tell myself. Do these tourists around me realize that this person between them is not moving at all?

He is an outside observer, even if he is in the center. An intruder.

He doesn‘t really want to go anymore, doesn‘t really know where to go. He doesn‘t know where he is right now, what he stands for. He does not feel comfortable here, that’s for sure. He feels like a stranger where he lives. Right now, he exists only in himself and for himself alone. He starts loosing his identity. He doesn‘t know real from pretend and cannot separate his work world from his home world – as Marx says, What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal. He feels alienated – again.

Alexander Giesche

I wonder whether I‘ll tell the truth the next time I am asked: Where are you now? Maybe I’ll just say: I went North and face the West.

Alexander Giesche (Germany, 1982) calls himself a ‘performanceinstaller’. His ‘theatre’ is a laboratory that tries to modify the conventions of the genre and succeeds in creating a world with blurred outlines, circulating between performance and visual art, movement and paralysis, dream and material substance, sounds, language and silence.

Giesche graduated in Applied Theatre Studies from Giessen University.

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EYE On the 5th of April in 2012, the skyline of Amsterdam North changed forever with the opening of the EYE film museum and cinema.

With over 500,000 visitors that very first year, the EYE on the IJ promenade is one of the biggest cultural public attractions in the North.

Location: IJpromenade 1

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Talking with Places

Mor Shani (Israel, 1985) is a freelance choreographer and teacher, based in the Netherlands. He started his professional career as a dancer in the Bat Dor dance company in Israel. In 2009, he graduated from the choreography department of the ArtEZ Dance Academy (Arnhem). Shani’s work is presented across Europe and has won several international awards.

my god, i spent few days in a catholic church. i can’t believe you invented religious people. they say you are a god full of mercy. i have once heard that if you were not full of mercy, mercy would have been in the world, not just in you. this might be correct, so i am learning now - gravity is a cruel joke. grace is not enough anymore. please say something new. thank you in advance, mor.

De Heilige Augustinusparochie St. Augustine has been the patron saint of Amsterdam North since the arrival of the Augustinian friars in Holland in 1669.

Various churches have been dedicated to him since then, and now the former Stephanus (the present Roman Catholic St. Augustine Parish) has been too.

It is the main church for this city district.

Location: Kamperfoelieweg 209

Mor Shani

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Aline Benecke (Germany, 1980) creates in her performances essayistic, narrative formats based on found photographs, establishing a field of tension between memory, subjectifation and cultural identity. Currently, she is working on her research project Photographs Found in Auschwitz…, which investigates the social construction of history and cultures of remembrance.

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Museum Amsterdam Noord Founded in 2009, the Museum Amsterdam Noord is located in a former bathhouse. Volunteer Miep van Berkestijn says it’s important for residents to be able to identify with what is exhibited here.

Location: Zamenhofstraat 28a

Dear Reader, This week I was embedded in a little museum in Amsterdam North which is about that district of the city: the Museum Amsterdam Noord.

This week was supposed to give us the time and opportunity to simply let things happen.

This is actually more complicated than it sounds. I did have one nice moment drinking beer whilst sitting in the sun. But somehow I couldn’t overcome the feeling of having to be somewhere else or having to do something else. It was nearly impossible for me to slow down. This has to do with various things: One week is very short in order to accept another experience of time – and due to practicalities, I only could have spent three hours a day in the museum, so I decided to make it ‘worthwhile’ by working there.

Imagine my surprise on the first day when my host told me that he had never heard of the term ‘WLAN’ and my frustration at not being able to connect virtually to another space.

I knew how to help myself, though, and prepared my emails while I was there in order to send them in the evening. I created a trace of these conversations to have a look at what I was busy with during my time at the museum of Amsterdam North and I ask myself: What other opportunities did I miss?

Aline Benecke

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Nina Boas

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Nina Boas (France/The Netherlands, 1980) is a performance artist coming from a fine art background. In her work, she collaborates with choreographers, musicians and dancers. In addition to her practice, she organises the performance event PAE and is part of the collective Trickster. Boas graduated from the AKI, ArtEZ Academy of Fine Arts, Enschede.

Dear Ditta, Imagine a place with silver walls, pink sweet-sixteen flags, a corner sofa covered in magenta fabric with golden pillows, pink lanterns, oriental lamps, sheer purple curtains and silver Arabic tea accessories. Black tea with mint is being served in Turkish tea glasses. Women walk in and out, always bringing something to eat, like cookies or other sweet treats, and flowers to thank their host. It’s a warm place with the feeling of a community centre.

But this place, called ‘Vrouwenbazaar’ (Women’s Bazaar), was not initiated by the Dutch authorities. Arab women run this bottom-up initiative.

The next day I brought tea, realizing that this was what everyone shared in their encounter with Samar, the woman who runs the place. While Samar pours the women a cup of tea, she listens to their questions and then quietly thinks of a solution. Whether it is a homework group for kids, a woman wanting help with bureaucratic paperwork, Dutch lessons, computer classes for adults, start-up enterprises, people looking for a space to throw a party, organizations that want more visibility in the neighbourhood, cooking classes, addressing issues like men’s emancipation or preventing youth from being influenced by ISIS, parenting parties, or gardening in public space. People even come to her if they want to organize a big event like a celebration of the Feast of the Sacrifice, a ‘party for the whole family’ as stated on her pink flyers. They all come with their questions to the women bazaar. In the few days I was there, these were just a few of the things I witnessed or took part in. And the driving force behind all of this is Samar, who said on my first day: ‘Too bad you are here this week, because it’s not very busy.’ I wonder what a normal week looks like, because for me this seemed busy enough.

Women’s Bazaar Founder Samar Shalaan is busy day and night with the Women’s Bazaar (Vrouwenbazaar). Her motive is to get women out of their isolation at home and help them develop their capacities and talents.

A large part of this entails connecting residents with local authorities, cultural institutes and businesses.

Location: Heimansweg 33

During these few days, I really felt I actually could mean something to a few of the people I met. I felt privileged for the opportunity to peer into this world, a world very unknown to me. But most of all, I felt very welcome.

Best Nina

Nina

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Astrit Ismaili (Kosovo, 1991) is a multidisciplinary artist working in theatre and visual arts. His work is an intimate experience that examines family themes, gender issues, perception and transformation. He often reactivates abandoned sites or construction zones by creating massive performance art pieces. Ismaili studied theatre directing at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Pristina, Kosovo.

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De Meeuw Partaking of an iftar, following a yogarobics course or simply spending an afternoon playing cards in the neighbourhood café. The activities of the De Meeuw community centre are as multifaceted and diverse as its visitors.

Location: Motorwal 300

To You I sit in the corridor. Pressured from both sides. A book in my bag. An iPhone in my pocket. I decide to ignore both. I keep on sitting in the corner, just observing without any particular reason or maybe with a concrete one: staring at people.

I close my eyes for a minute. I open them and the space is filled with a group of old grannies and grandpas. The smell of old skin and bone immediately stick to my body and hair and I become part of it.

-Thanks! I say to myself. That’s all that was missing!

My hair covers my face. I feel anxious. In a panic, I ask in English for a rubber hair band. I’m afraid that no one will understand. But an old Chinese grannie who looks like a fat lazy cat starts walking towards me.

After a century of walking, she stops in front of me. She lifts her super shaky hands to her grey hair, removes her hair band and gives it me.

Everybody starts laughing hysterically. Old people falling on the ground.

Laughing so hard. Gasping for breath. Shedding tears. Breaking dental prostheses. Screaming joyfully. Extremely loud. Unstoppable. Like a domino effect. Until a tall Dutch oldie who looks like a tough straight tree stops the joy with a serious tone.

-We’re happy to have you here!

Everybody becomes serious = unhappy. I don’t know what to do. I stay, and then I smile and then I start fixing my hair with the rubber band from the cat. They start talking in Dutch with each other and somehow lose interest in me. I stay still in the corridor until someone rapidly opens the door. I get scared! An old grandpa appears slowly. He looks at me with his sweet blue eyes, shiny smile and picturesque wrinkles and asks me to join in. I can’t resist.

Astrit Ismaili

Astrit Ismaili

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DasArts - Master of Theatre

Amsterdam North Food Bank Helping people who barely can make ends meet – the volunteers at the food bank put a lot of energy into making this possible.

In April of last year, a record number of 337 households in the North used the food bank; in September, this number dropped to 296.

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Ahmed Khaled (Iraq/Belgium, 1985) is a theatre-maker and performer. In his work, he researches how elements such as society, education, religion, politics, culture and transformation influence the nature and behaviour of a human being. Khaled studied theatre at the Institute of Fine Arts in Bagdad. Since 2008, he has been living and working in Belgium.

Location: Adelaarsweg 61

Dear Mother, Eight years have gone by without my speaking to you. I am writing you this letter to share my latest difficult experience.

I spent a couple of days embedded at the Voedselbank in Amsterdam North, where I had to give people food. This sounds great, but the problem was that there was no system for distributing the food in an unbiased way. The procedure for distribution at the Voedselbank is partially based upon individual observation; that is, looking at people’s faces and witnessing their behavior, and from this observation deciding what kind of food to give them. The food varied hugely, e.g. one large piece of sausage meat, ten small packages of fish and five cans of coffee. This made it all very confusing.

You taught me not to judge people by their face or their outward appearance. Moreover, with this way of sharing one cannot avoid feelings of sadness, guilt and shame. Surely you weren’t aware that there is a Voedselbank in Amsterdam North which functions against your ethics.

However, even if this place did not exist, I would never be capable of avoiding these feelings. I just keep diving into these feelings more and more. I feel ashamed of running away to protect myself. I feel a deep sadness knowing that you once asked your god to take you in my stead. I feel guilty because of seeing everything collapsing, while at the same time I feel glad that it is not my mission to stop it.

Ahmed Khaled

Photo: Karin van de Wiel

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‘If we already know that flamingos can’t tell us anything, then we ultimately close our eyes to the world in its entirety.’

A quote from Ulrich Baer, which Michael Kliën included in his letter to the students

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Lucia Marneanu

Lucia Mărneanu (Romania, 1988) is an actor, performer, artist and children’s book illustrator. She co-founded the Reciproca cultural platform, which tries to foster social and civic responsibility through various art forms, ranging from political cartoons and on-site installations to devised-theatre plays. Mărneanu graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts and the Faculty of Theatre and Television in Cluj.

Lucia

Talking with Places

Cigo For more than six years now, Duvan Kilic and his brothers have owned and run the Cigo tobacco shop. Open seven days a week, the little kiosk is also a central gathering point for neighbourhood residents.

Location: Van der Pekstraat 137

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Jaha Koo (South Korea, 1984), a.k.a. GuJAHA, is a theatremaker and music composer. Since 2007, he has been focusing on the potential performativity of multimedia. Along with this, he has attempted to conceptualize new theatrical formats involving human history and political situations. He majored in Theatre Studies at the Korea National University of Arts in Seoul.

Jaha Koo

Dear Y. Kim, I was looking forward to seeing you after reading your stories. When I went to your old workplace, it had already been torn down. Someone there told me that you had a new place in a side street. It was huge and tidy. I entered the space and found your old, grey iron letterbox.

At that point, I accidentally met a stranger. She told me that you had left for good. I gazed at the letterbox vacantly for a moment because it was the only thing there in which I could feel a vestige of you. That was eight years ago already.

Last spring, I heard that you had moved to Busan. You have moved to many cities. As a novelist, you seek inspiration from various areas, regions, places and spaces. One day, I thought that it might be better to remain a stranger as an artist, eternally. However, then I realized that I’ve already been a stranger as a ‘semi-permanent resident’. I’ve been like that. Maybe I learned it from you.

Now, I’m staying somewhere unfamiliar in Amsterdam North, watching old pictures and hearing stories from old people who have spent their lives here. Suddenly, it reminded me of you and your stories: I have the right to destroy myself.

Best regards, Jaha Koo

Amsterdam North Historical Centre

Jaha

From the very first maps of Amsterdam North to the most recent developments on the banks of the IJ, the rich and unruly history of this district of the city is carefully archived by the staff and volunteers of the Historisch Centrum Amsterdam-Noord.

Location: Johan van Hasseltweg 32b

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Eleana Alexandrou (Cyprus, 1986) has worked as a professional performer since 2004 and has been creating her own work since 2011. Alexandrou is co-founder of bytheway productions, a dance, devised theatre and applied arts company. She received a BA (Hons) from Bath Spa University, UK, in performance and choreography.

Dear Locker, You are green, 40 cm wide, 60 cm tall and 40 cm deep, standing in the main first floor corridor of my school. You hold my purple box file with printouts and other copies of information and knowledge that I will forget about. You hold my heavy books sorted by height and thickness. Languages are the first category, starting from the left; those subjects have the biggest books. On the inside part of the door is a photograph of Balloon, my first cat; he passed away before I was ready. Also, a photograph of me and my boyfriend, the one in the swimming pool when it was the beginning and I was madly in love. You are very organised, tidy and efficient, so that time is not wasted when looking for the next relevant items. You also hold a small pocket with some sanitary towels, bandages and period pain tablets, although I only use the tablets from that pocket. I am very regular... no surprises. There is a bottle of water and chewing gum. I will not really chew much gum in the future, I think; only when I’m in the car with my partner. A couple of extra pens and tape. And an envelope, to keep my secret notes safe. Oh… and of course there is a spot in front of the books where a different tiny item is placed every time I eat a Kinder Egg. I take that item home at the end of the day and put it on the designated shelf over my desk. I don’t really remember what will happen to all these mini Kinder Egg treasures I keep... They will probably be binned.

Dear Locker, you never existed, not in another colour, not even as a concept. You would be useful. You would be comforting. You would be mine for seven years. And I would thank you for that.

Yours, Eleana

De nieuwe Havo Dolf Brugman has been working as a school caretaker at the De nieuwe Havo secondary school for four years now. His philosophy is that communicating with students honestly and openly creates a good atmosphere in the school.

As a caretaker, he makes an important contribution to this.

Location: Buiksloterweg 85

Eleana Alexandrou

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Dear Curiosity,

Ogutu Muraya

DasArts - Master of Theatre

I hope this letter finds you active.

There is no time for small talk, so allow me to go straight to the point.

During the week of the 6th of October, I spent several hours a day in a library in the North of Amsterdam. My task was to be there and do nothing but observe.

I struggled a lot with this notion of being without any making intervention. Every cell in me desired action. My eyes darted at the sign of moment. My ears sharpened when people talked. But nothing made me animated. I then desperately wanted to escape but I couldn’t. I felt like a book hoarder trapped in a pile of unreadable books.

A library is a strange place. It calls for silence, only to enter the noisy world of words. In itself, it is not an exciting space. It is highly structured and therefore every action is predetermined and revolves around knowledge in whatever form it’s presented.

As a writer I should find a library comforting; yet, believe me, it provided neither comfort nor torment. I spent a healthy amount of my time day-dreaming, drooling and doodling.

I have always worked with the economics of subtraction, constantly discounting and dismissing what I perceive as worthless and meaningless. My eyes are conditioned to weigh, filter, and refine experiences into singular events assigned meaning. Consciously or unconsciously, my embedded experience was in danger of being doomed as a hollow encounter.

Then I allowed myself to work with a different kind of economics – the economics of mutual vulnerability: to not know, not value, not impose meaning, to only observe, immerse, and be. Stating that and living it are two very different realities. It took me a while to reconcile the difference between what was said and what was done.

There is something beautiful in being incoherent.

I will end here. Send my regards to Opportunity; it’s likely the two of you will never meet up, but who knows.

Yours truly, Ogutu Muraya P.S: I am slowly starting to internalize the Kiswahili saying, haraka haraka haina baraka – haste hath no blessings.

Ogutu

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Ogutu Muraya (Kenya, 1986) is a writer, theatre-maker and storyteller. He is fond of writing and telling stories based on true events, drawn from the past and living memories. Muraya studied International Relations at USIU-Africa and is currently the Creative Director of The Theatre Company of Kenya.

Public Library After seven years of being housed in temporary quarters, in August 2013 the Nieuwendam library opened its doors in a new, multifunctional building.

In addition to loaning out books, CD-ROMs, and games, it offers many activities, such as courses in Dutch and working with the Internet.

Location: Waterlandplein 302

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De Lokatie From tableware to furniture, a refrigerator or a pair of socks – you can find everything at this recycling centre.

Kringloopbedrijf De Lokatie has been doing its bit to extend the lifespan of goods since 1996, while also functioning as a workplace for people with special needs.

Location: Distelweg 85

Noah Voelker Talking with Places

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Seth,

I spent a week in a charity second-hand shop. It reminds me of the places we would shop for clothes as well props for our shows.

It is strange, Amsterdam North is a lot like San Antonio in some ways. I mean that in the way that it feels. It is an area that was once forgotten by the rest; it is a bit poorer and has a large minority population. It also has the feeling of creeping gentrification, maybe more so than San Antonio.

I like it here; it is quiet, easy to move around on my bike, and there are some pretty nice bars. At the place where I was embedded for a week, I was a ghost for the four hours of the day I was there; I would walk around both in the shop and in the back storerooms without anyone really noticing me. It was a bit surreal.

My host, a manager and not the guy in the photo, kept asking me if I was going to write a play about the place. At the beginning of the week, I had no idea what to write. You know I’ve written dramatic things before, but right now playwriting isn’t really a mode of working I thought I would practice at this moment.

Noah Voelker (United States, 1990) is a theatre-maker and director. He is interested in exploring the relationship between audience and performers, particularly how to invite the audience as collaborators. He is part of the Aesthetic of Waste collective. Voelker received a B.A. in Theatre as well as in Economics from Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.

Noah

Well, by midweek I had something that interested me, the only thing that really stood out. The books. In the back storeroom there are thousands of books waiting for sorting, and most of them are thrown in big blue bins and sold by the kilo. This endless process of rapid sorting really stuck with me. I even made a video of book after book being thrown into a bin. I’m going to write something and I am doing it out of an odd obligation, because this manager was okay with a stranger walking around without doing anything productive for a week. I mean, I was in this place for a week and nothing came up, but this one small detail that for some reason fascinates me, so I guess that it is a good starting place.

I’m sure, like most things I create, it will start off being normal and quickly turn absurd. I’ll send it to you once I am finished. Good luck with writing ‘Ubu Heights’; I’m sorry I won’t be there to see it.

Best, Noah V.

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DasArts - Master of Theatre

Ana Wild (Israel, 1987) is a music-theatre maker. In her work, Wild uses music as a structure for looking into typical human behaviour, and conceptually challenges terms such as ‘opera’ and ‘the musical’ in order to utilize audio-stage relationships in new ways. Wild is a graduate of The School of Visual Theatre in Jerusalem.

Ana Wild Talking with Places

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De Ceuvel

Ana

At Broedplaats de Ceuvel, a ‘breeding ground’ in a former shipyard in the harbour area of Amsterdam North, a group of architects, artists and artisans build sustainable workplaces in second-hand houseboats. The Theatre Embassy, an international theatre and network organization, is also situated here Location: Korte Papaverweg 2

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Talking with Places

Photo: Thomas Lenden

The Tip of an Iceberg

On context-related artistic practices

text Sébastien Hendrickx

As part of ‘Talking with Places - Art in the Real World’, a three-day programme on context-related artistic practices, the artist-activist John Jordan, the scenographer Jozef Wouters and the theatre-maker Simon Allemeersch were invited to DasArts to discuss their work. Co-mentor Sébastien Hendrickx, who set up the programme, wrote this piece afterwards.

Sébastien Hendrickx (Belgium, 1983) works as a dramaturge for various performance artists, including Benjamin Verdonck, Thomas Bellinck, Jozef Wouters, Heike Langsdorf, Simon Allemeersch and Ula Sickle.

He is an editor of the performing arts magazine Etcetera. Previously, Hendrickx was artistic director of the Bâtard Festival and a member of the artistic staff at the KVS City Theatre in Brussels. He studied dramaturgy at Ghent University and graduated from the Experimental Atelier Sint-Lucas Ghent.

Location: Ferry, Buiksloterweg

Site Specificity Although Wouters, Jordan and Allemeersch often venture outside the usual places where art is produced and presented, the focus of Art in the Real World was not on ‘going outside’, but on context-related artistic practice.

This practice distinguishes itself more by the ways in which it relates to its immediate spatial–temporal surroundings than by the kind of space in which it takes place. Thus, the how is more important than the where.

For some artists, the context within which they develop or display their work is a generic place that must have a number of basic facilities and aesthetic qualities. Others treat it as a specific, meaningful and layered time-space with which their practice intensely interacts; for them, a physical place is always the tip of an iceberg.

A scenographer can for instance choose to design spaces that easily fit into the ‘average theatre hall’. Jozef Wouters, on the other hand, prefers site-specific forms of scenography: ‘The lightness, speed and temporality of scenography could enable a scenographer to react to a specific context and allow it to have an impact on his work.’1 Needless to say, this site-specificity means that context-related work is often difficult to repeat or relocate.

Moving from one spatial-temporal context to another can necessitate a feat of artistic translation, which sometimes even leads to a new artwork.

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DasArts - Master of Theatre

In order to gain insight into the complexity of a specific environs, an artist develops an often time-intensive practice that bears resemblances to that of a sociologist

Complexity Valuable context-related artistic practices treat the specific time-spaces they interact with as complex entities.

The philosopher Isabelle Stengers calls entities ‘complex’ when they are heterogeneous but cannot be broken down into a series of simpler parts. This is possible with ‘complicated’ units, however: the working of the whole can be analysed on the basis of the interplay of the functional parts. The former entities are in a continual state of change, whereas the latter have more stability. A community of baboons is complex because it does not have established hierarchies. Day in and day out, baboons negotiate their positions and functions within the group.

A good many aspects of our human society can be described as complicated rather than complex. For instance, the meaning of a police uniform or a red stoplight is not ambiguous or negotiable. Stengers sketches a contrast between complexity as a given fact – such as with the baboon society – and complexity as a practical choice.

Man-made conventions, for instance, bring order and stability to cities, thereby facilitating the coexistence of great concentrations of people.2 Artist-Doctor The choice of complexity is disputable, however, when we begin to see everything that is complex as a problem or a lack of something as a result of having made this choice. Stengers warns of the effects of using the human body as a metaphor for the city, because this metaphor often generates images of sickness. The municipal body is considered ‘healthy’ when it is in a complicated state and the various parts fulfil their functions within the whole ‘as they should’. Sickness occurs when strange, uninvited guests appear, bizarre new connections arise, functions suddenly fall away.3 When artists operate in urban contexts, this usually occurs in so-called ‘difficult’ neighbourhoods, such as gentrifying Amsterdam North. Often, they are sent there or send themselves there as artists-doctors, with an artistic project – no matter how ephemeral and symbolic – as medicine. Their zeal for bringing the urban

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Warming up to a Worm by Eleana Alexandrou. Location: Corner Hagedoornplein and Sperwerlaan 39

body ‘back’ from a complex state to a complicated, stable state, and their blindness for the ideological tone of what is deemed ‘healthy’ or ‘sick’ often makes them unintentional allies of administrators, urbanists and project developers. The suppression of complexity removes us ever further from a city that affords room for actual heterogeneity, negotiation, experimentation and a more open articulation of conflicts.

Artist–Sociologist In order to gain insight into the complexity of a specific environs, an artist develops an often time-intensive practice that bears resemblances to that of a sociologist – not the classical social scientist who studies a certain phenomenon with the help of an extensive theoreticalconceptual framework and quantifying tools such as statistics, but the practitioner of what philosopher Bruno Latour calls a ‘sociology of associations’.4 Whereas the former considers the social as a separate domain of reality next to other domains such as the economic, the political or the judicial, the latter sees the social as a trail of associations between heterogeneous elements, the nature of which can be economic, political, juridical, etc. The artist’s slow, searching practice consists of mapping a poorly legible and instable interplay of connections, without subjecting them to personal prejudices and categories or drawing general conclusions. The artist has no other choice but to minimize the distance between himself and his study object by following Stengers’ device: ‘Apprendre en situation et non pas à propos de la situation.’5 Simon Allemeersch worked for more than two years in a social housing block in Ghent (Belgium) whose residents were gradually evacuated. Only by becoming part of this environment himself did he gain insight into the complex, constantly changing interplay between memories of residents; forms of solidarity, friendship and animosity; psychological problems; poverty and informal economies; legal regulations and urban renewal operations. This research process resulted in a performance and a book.

Photo: Nellie de Boer

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Expanding the Field of Artistic Choice Sociologist Rudi Laermans distinguishes two ways of considering art, which in the case of context-related artistic practices can be difficult to separate from one another. Art researchers and critics usually focus on the internal qualities of art works and often treat these works as if they were autonomous artefacts, cut free from their context of production. Opposite to this internalist approach is the externalist perspective of art sociologists, who ‘unmask the discourse on artistic autonomy with a greater or lesser display of strength by pointing out the many social dependencies (…) in the processes of art production and distribution’.7 The overlapping of these two approaches in the consideration of context-related work occurs because self-conscious interaction with all sorts of possible spatial–temporal environmental factors is always inherently part of the work itself.

When Tate Modern invited John Jordan’s Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination to give a workshop titled Disobedience Makes History, the institute set a limit on the possibilities for disobedience: eventual activism must not affect its sponsors, among them British Petroleum.

Jordan accordingly projected the prohibitive email on a museum wall and asked the workshop participants if they wanted to follow this order or ignore it.8 This intervention is a very simple example of how the ‘internal’ field of artistic choice can be expanded by opening it up to the ‘external’ context of time and place.

The programme Art in the Real World makes it clear that this expansion can occur in various ways. We cannot reduce context-related artistic practices to a single artistic discipline, strategy, content or style. No artist is identical to another, and the same can be said of the contexts in which they work. Now and then the encounter between the two can create sparks.

Foto: Nellie de Boer

1 Wouters, J., ‘Space has a tendency to take place in the mind more than in reality.’ In: Etcetera, 32 (2014), no.

138, pp. 34-35. / 2 Stengers, I., ‘Réinventer la ville: le choix de la complexité’. Speech given during the colloquium Urbanités: rencontres pour réinventer la ville, 2000. / 3 Ibid. / 4 Latour, B., Reassembling the Social. Oxford University Press 2005. / 5 Stengers, I., ‘Réinventer la ville: le choix de la complexité’. 2000. / 6 Allemeersch, S., et al, Rabot. Ghent, 2014. / 7 Laermans, R., ‘Artistieke autonomie als waarde en praktijk’ in: Corsten, M., H. Fens, P. Gielen, C. Niesten (eds.), Autonomie als waarde: dilemma’s in kunst en onderwijs, Valiz, Amsterdam; Fontys School of Fine and Performing Arts, Tilburg 2013 / 8 Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, A User’s Guide to (Demanding) the Impossible, Minor Compositions. New York, 2010.

‘Possible Ghosts of This Cafe’ by Noah Voelker. Location: Cafe de Klaproos, Klaprozenweg 60

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‘There are no innocent spaces!’

Claudia Bosse

Claudia Bosse (Germany,1969) is an artist and theatre director, and the artistic director of theatercombinat in Vienna, a trans-disciplinary company she co-founded in 1996 in Berlin.

She works in the field of experimental theatre, focussing on urban interventions, space choreographies, hybrid theatre works, research on political and intimate narratives and theatrical concepts for different spaces and publics. Ongoing projects are some democratic fictions and (katastrophen 11/15) ideal paradise.

As part of Talking with Places, Claudia Bosse gave the public lecture The Grammar of Catastrophe and a workshop for the students, which resulted in the presentation Performing Politics in Space.

Photo: Karin van de Wiel

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Amsterdam North in Numbers

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Performing Politics in Space. Location: Former laboratory of Shell on Overhoeksplein

Talking with Places

NEVER FREE OF IDEALOGY On Changing Fascinations for Places

text Barbara Van Lindt & Karin van de Wiel in collaboration with Willemijn Lamp

Photo: Jitske Schols

The big empty wing of the future home of DasArts has been stripped bare. Floorboards are missing or lie scattered about the room and wires hang from the ceiling. In this ravaged building, artist Claudia Bosse was invited to make a context-specific work with the students as part of Talking with Places. Which raises the question of what makes vacant industrial complexes and weather-beaten buildings so attractive, in fact? Why do we like to roam around in them so much, and why do we feel the urge to register decay and put it on display?

The assignment: Investigate the significance of the empty, stripped-down space of a laboratory that has fallen into disuse. The questions of who had previously been housed here (the Shell Oil Company’s Research and Technology Centre) and what the future allocation of the building is (the new accommodations of DasArts and several other departments of the AHK and the Theaterschool) were easy to answer. But artist Claudia Bosse wanted to know more: had the building also had other tenants, what is the building’s monetary value, what sort of business did Shell conduct here, did the company ever fall into discredit, when and how did the building fall short, and what function does it have in the North at present?

The students were challenged in this assignment to investigate how a space, in its present physical state and its lost functionality, can fulfil the role of co-author in an artistic work. Bosse herself has over the years developed a sensitivity for the spatial, ideological, historical and utilitarian aspects of the places where she makes her work. Her exhibitions and installations are performative interventions and spatial compositions which are accurate reflections of this.

Against the Establishment Since the second half of the 20th century, many vital artistic projects have taken place on industrial terrains and in rundown buildings. There are countless new

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Performing Politics in Space

Photo: Jitske Schols

In een korte tijd is ‘verhuizen naar Amsterdam-Noord’ gelijk komen te staan aan de wens om jezelf opnieuw uit te vinden.

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DasArts - Master of Theatre

Criticism is increasingly growing, and the introduction of the stigmatizing generalization ‘ruin porn’ is having an impact

art institutes which have claimed spaces in vacant factories, warehouses, shipyards, etc. – examples in Amsterdam being the Westergasterrein, the NDSM wharf and Het Veem Theater. Often coming from the squatters’ movement, the act of nabbing these vacant, bankrupt buildings also stood for rebellion against the establishment (in the meantime, these organizations have become part of the existing order themselves), against traditional forms of representation, against old-fashioned institutional structures. In this alternative circuit, from these fringes, the prevailing system was critically questioned.

Terrains and buildings such as these were not only places for permanent settlement. Many artists purposely chose specific locations because they contributed to the expressiveness and necessity of a work or performance. Theatergroep Hollandia, Dogtroep and the Oerol Festival were among the Dutch pioneers. It has become an accepted genre: site-specific theatre. Vacant, inhospitable, raw places still hold a great attraction for artists of that school.

Cultivating Decay The fascination for decay can perhaps be traced back to a classic theme in art: vanitas, which in Latin means vanity and vacuity. This theme was especially popular in 17thcentury Dutch and Flemish painting. Lifeless objects like skulls, wilted flowers, timepieces or toppled glasses were meant to convey the message that death is inevitable and that we should above all enjoy life to the fullest because our time on earth is limited.

Architecture also has a tradition of cultivating decay.

In the 18th century, the architect and artist Piranesi made detailed, elaborately embellished etchings of the timeworn ruins of Rome. His expertise on ancient building techniques and his tendency to aestheticize ruins converged here. Goethe was disappointed on his first visit to Rome; the dramatic effect of Piranesi’s graphic work had misled him.

Performing Politics in Space

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Recently, the success of photographic projects about dilapidated buildings and deserted cities seems to confirm this universal fascination. The photo books Detroit Disassembled (Andrew Moore & Yves Marchand) and The Ruins of Detroit (Romain Meffre), both from 2010,

are known throughout the world and lie on great many coffee tables. New projects that can be placed within this trend are still appearing. But criticism is increasingly growing, and the introduction of the stigmatizing generalization ‘ruin porn’ is having an impact.

Perverse Kick The term ruin porn refers to the reversal that has occurred: from fascination to perverse enjoyment, from artistic interest to commercial exploitation. On the website of the popular travel guide The Lonely Planet, the abandoned Packard Automotive Plant in Detroit is recommended as a place worth seeing. The travel guide also extols the city’s aura: ‘The city does waft a sort of bombed-out early East Berlin vibe, it’s these same qualities that fuel a raw urban energy that you won’t find anywhere else. It’s a grim, but fascinating destination.’1 By now, the number of publications on the subject would fill entire walls of bookcases; the search combination ‘abandoned buildings’ gets 4,850,000 responses on the Internet within 45 seconds. A great many of these hits are photographs made by ‘parachuters’2, who are gone as fast as they came. Pulitzer Prize winner Jeffery Eugenides, who grew up in Detroit, has also spoken out about this: ‘Because I, too, have committed the sin of aestheticizing Detroit’s demise, I’m well aware of the seduction of this posture and, therefore, all the more eager to condemn it now... To see the city of Detroit as it is, today, a beatenup, beaten-down place of incalculable difficulties, but a place where a half million people still live... It’s a big country, and if one place craps out on you, you leave it behind and find somewhere new. But not everyone gets to leave. Not everyone wants to leave. And so, if you visit the Rust Belt now, you come face to face with a central breakdown in American capitalism. No country that calls itself great can allow such a vast swath of its territory to be written off as has been the case here.’3 At their best, the photos of depopulated Detroit can serve as visual evidence of the abandoned ambitions of this formerly flourishing and prosperous industrial city. The extreme aesthetic deterioration reflects the merciless decline of the ultimate capitalist system. The photogenic, dilapidated sarcophagus of Chernobyl is also an illustrative remnant of a badly functioning system – communism.

DasArts - Master of Theatre

The epicentre of the prevailing order may be the fringes

Authorship Recycled within commercial hype, little is left of the critical potential of such projects. But the term ruin porn also threatens to undeservedly become a stamp for everything associated with ravaged locations. In order to correct this tendency, sincere and constructive action must be recognized and valued. Arjen Oosterman, architectural historian and chief editor of the architecture and design magazine Volume, points to the many initiatives – also in Detroit – of a mixed population of artists, architects and sociologists, all of whom want to take action. ‘This development is also leading to a different interpretation of the concept of authorship and ownership. Many projects are developed collectively, so no one can claim authorship. This way of working is fairly usual amongst hackers and in the digital world, but in the traditional arts it is still less customary. Ruin porn is an undervaluation of what is really going on.’4 The term indeed explicitly refers to the mass medium of photography, whereas such small-scale projects typically have little exposure.

Bosse emphasizes that her current work does not revolve around the external and at times aesthetic decline of the ‘churches of industrialization’, but that her motivation stems from a desire to expose underlying power structures. Involvement with the space and dialogue are the central focus. ‘In a city, space always means power.

The people who administer the space are the ones who are the bosses. So, producing work in such a space first of all means investigating those power structures. This entails ‘activating’ the space within the architectural and cultural-social narrative. Within the conditions set by the space, I seek a confrontation with the space that goes beyond its designated functionality.’5 New Work Terrains The function of this sort of rundown space continually changes, among other things because of the attractiveness it holds within the framework of the rapid process of gentrification for media companies like MTV, for instance, or advertising agencies. A ‘World without Objects’, Oosterman calls this. He explains that companies have adopted the aesthetic attitude, which assumes that you can work wherever your laptop and your smart phone are. Within these conditions, it is interesting to contrast hypermodern technology with a raw environment like nature or, indeed, an industrial area.

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Performing Politics in Space

Both Oosterman and Bosse indicate that fascination for rundown industrial areas is declining amongst artists, as it also is amongst the public. The nasty aftertaste of commercialization and the rising prices of real estate certainly play a role in this. Bosse has the impression that young theatre-makers are again taking refuge in conventional theatres, partly because they don’t want to trip themselves up on the spatial conditions of deteriorated buildings. As possible new work terrains, Oosterman mentions ‘non-places’ like airports and squares: ‘These types of locations are harder to conquer.

Non-places are a big challenge because at first sight they seem ordinary, but when seen through the eyes of an artist, they can become interesting again.’

Critical Possibilities New critical possibilities can be found at locations that no longer embody the power structures of the past, but are designed by current political, economic and social agendas. The epicentre of the prevailing order may be the fringes. Perhaps artists can create the proverbial fringes in public space – or create spaces of the imagination, like floating bubbles of oxygen that can thrive anywhere.

DasArts will occupy Shell’s renovated laboratory within a year. At the same time, new buildings are rising all around: a hotel/club/conference centre, a mega accommodation for over a thousand backpackers and next door to that, a multimedia tourist attraction for the deluxe world traveller. These buildings will be built with an eye to an energy-neutral future, but are not devoid of ideology. Although they won’t have the charm of an old building, these new highrises and renovation projects will embody the many-sidedness of the cultural, social and economic narrative which is now being created. They will act as a provocation perhaps, a possible platform, a partner for a project, or all of these at once.

1 The Lonely Planet, USA. Fifth editon (2008), pp. 599. / 2 Chayka, K., ‘Detroit Ruin Porn and the Fetish for Decay’.

In: Hyperallergic, January 13, 2011. / 3 Eugenides, J., ‘Against Ruin Porn’. In: Boat Magazine, 27 March 2014. / 4 From: Transcription of roundtable discussion within the framework of Talking with Places led by Willemijn Lamp, with Frank Alsema, Claudia Bosse and Arjen Oosterman. November 4 2014 - DasArts. / 5 Ibid. / 6 Ibid.

Photo: Jitske Schols

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DasArts - Master of Theatre

Location: Bookstore Over het water, Van der Pekstraat 59

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Talking with Places

rEcoMMENDED Hope you enjoyed the articles in the magazine. Want to know more about the subject? Some tips by our mentors Chris Keulemans, Sébastien Hendrickx and Willemijn Lamp.

facing the contemporary theatremaker. In this book, he combines his unbridled curiosity about artistic processes in a dynamic Europe with a critical analysis of the dominance of free market processes in art. Willemijn

BOOKS Rustom Bharucha The Politics of Cultural Practice: Thinking Through Theatre in an Age of Globalization, 2000 A passionate analysis of globalization’s effect on the arts, and simultaneously an argument for the unique position that art has for offering resistance to all too simple and superficial views of the added value of intercultural processes. Willemijn Richard Florida The Rise of the Creative Class, 2002 Some books I don’t want to read, because I don’t want them to turn out to be right. By now, nobody has to read Florida anymore, because he has already been proven right. Chris

Photo: Thomas Lenden

Willemijn Lamp (The Netherlands, 1977), mentor of this block, is the founder and co-director of Read My World, a literature festival in Amsterdam. In the past she worked as a curator for the international literature festival Writers Unlimited.

Besides her freelance activities as a curator of debates and festivals, she works as a journalist and theatre/literature critic. Lamp also sits on the Province of Flevoland’s advisory committee for performing arts and has been an advisor to the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts (AFK).

Thomas Hirschhorn Musée Précaire Albinet, Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, 2005 A temporary museum set up by Thomas Hirschhorn on the outskirts of Paris, in which original artworks

by Duchamp, Warhol, Beuys and others were exhibited. A recalcitrant, risky work that keeps haunting me.

Through email exchanges, the book offers insight into the many negotiations with various parties behind the project. Sébastien Dragan Klaic Resetting the Stage: Public Theatre between the Market and Democracy, 2012 Klaic was a prominent European theatre critic who always succeeded in coming up with original and urgent ideas about the multiple challenges

Georges Perec Espèces d’espaces, 1974 A gem of a book about spatiality that is built up like a Russian doll.

Perec begins with the space of the page and then discusses the bed, the room, the apartment, the apartment building, the street, the neighbourhood, the city… to end up with the universe. Can be very inspiring for artists who ‘want to talk with places’.

Renzo Martens Episode 3: Enjoy Poverty, 2008 An extremely controversial film that forces you to take a standpoint about your own practice when operating in a radically different context as a Westerner. Martens choses the African Congo and speaks about himself – which is precisely where this attempt to say something about the cynicism and decadence of Western art rubs the wrong way. I still haven’t worked it out… Willemijn

Sébastien

Jacques Rancière Le Maître ignorant – Cinq leçons sur l’émancipation intellectuelle, 1991 Nowadays many artists and curators are seeking contexts in which they come in contact with audiences who have little experience with looking at art. For those among them who think they should focus on simplification, recognizability or explanatory frames of reference, this book on intellectual emancipation is an absolute must.

POEMS K. Schippers Fijn dat u luistert, 2014 The master at noting the unnoted.

‘But then,’ he says when I complement him on this, ‘it’s not unnoted anymore, naturally.’ Chris In our building he left a poem: Two words Four words

Sébastien

DOCUMENTARY Johan van der Keuken Amsterdam Global Village, 1996 Amsterdam captured in a four-hour long marvel of irrepressible camerawork, editing as natural as breathing and love for inhabitants of the city who in their souls are still living on the other side of the world. Chris

DasArts - Master of Theatre

Dasarts & Colophon

About DasArts DasArts is a Master’s degree course within de theaterschool of the Amsterdam School of Arts. The two-year, question-based, residential Master’s programme functions as a laboratory and aims to improve the artistic competences of its international students.

Artists studying at DasArts define their goals and gradually explore and adopt the appropriate research methods.

Although the focus is on individual development, the main educational strategies revolve around the learning potential of encounters. Exchanges with peers, guest teachers and staff ideally have the character of ‘significant collisions’. By encouraging artists to tell their colleagues about their working processes, DasArts fosters ‘professional intimacy’. Both strategies enable important artistic developments and form the basis of the strong international network of DasArts.

DasArts is a Master of Theatre programme. Theatre is the backdrop: its history and conventions; both the traditions and the avant-garde spirit. Performance is part of this legacy. We consciously bring practitioners and theorists who contribute to the cross-cultural critical environment of the arts and performing arts into our programme.

In 2014, an international panel of experts has assessed DasArts as ‘Excellent across the Board’ (vision, learning environment, targeted and achieved learning outcomes).

According to the panel, DasArts serves as an example both nationally and internationally due to its challenging, innovative and original teaching environment. The study programme produces passionate and innovative theatremakers who receive recognition worldwide.

Talking with Places

Thanks to all contributors of ‘Talking with Places’ Udo Akemann, Bonny en Kees Alberts, Simon Allemeersch, Frank Alsema, Petra Ardai, Juul Beeren, Behzad (stichting Andishe), Miep van Berkesteijn (Museum Amsterdam Noord), Bite Me, Claudia Bosse, Andrea Božic, Mira ter Braak (de Modestraat), Dolf Brugman (De nieuwe Havo), Arie Bults, Broedplaats de Ceuvel, Ummuhan Eroglu, Studio Da Rebels, Berith Danse (Theatre Embassy), DAT! School, Jan Donkers, Alida Dors (Solid Ground Movement), Eye, Jeroen Fabius, theater Frascati, Gemeente Amsterdam - Stadsdeel Noord, Roel Griffioen, Harco Haagsma, Peter van Hameren (De nieuwe Havo), Rein Hartog, De Heilige Augustinusparochie, Sébastien Hendrickx, Mariken Heitman (Voedseltuin), Historisch Centrum Amsterdam Noord, John Jordan, Edit Kaldor, Femke Kaulingfreks, Duvan Kilic (Cigo), Michael Kliën, Koosje Laan (de Modestraat), Esther Lagendijk (Over het IJ Festival), Heike Langsdorf, het Leefkringhuis, Christina Li, Kringloopwinkel de Lokatie, Wouter van Loon, Abier Mahmoud (stichting Cleopatra), Piet Meeuse, Buurtcentrum De Meeuw, John Meijerink, OBA Hagedoornplein en Nieuwendam, De Noorderparkkamer, Saskia Noordhuis (Noordjes Kinderkunst), Arjen Oosterman, Merijn Oudenampsen, Sabine Pater (de Theaterstraat), Lode van Piggelen, Ingeborg Pollmann (Gemeente Amsterdam), Radio Futura, Jair Schalkwijk (de Doetank), K. Schippers, Samar Shalaan (de Vrouwenbazaar), Jeroen Slot (Gemeente Amsterdam), Marike Splint (de Theaterstraat), Willy Thomas, Tolhuistuin, Sabine de Tonnac (de Ceuvel), Paul Vonk, Nadja van der Weide, Jozef Wouters, Ingrid van Zelm (Gemeente Amsterdam).

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Sound work Buiksloterweg by Jaha Koo. Location: Tt. Neveritaweg 15

Concept development & coordination Karin van de Wiel / Studio KVDW Editorial team Chris Keulemans, Willemijn Lamp, Barbara Van Lindt, Karin van de Wiel Graphic Design Studio Rutger Vos Illustration Leonie Bos Printer Janssen/pers, Gennep Editorial team English translation & copy editing Jane Bemont, Copy editing Karin van de Wiel Publisher DasArts Amsterdam - The Netherlands © 2014 This magazine is published by DasArts, Master of Theatre. The institute is part of ‘de Theaterschool’, the theatre faculty of the Amsterdam School of the Arts in the Netherlands. During the autumn semester a ‘block’ is organized where guest mentors are invited to frame a semester with a topical theme. Each year a widely disseminated publication aims at sharing the experiences and insights that were part of it.

DasArts Havikslaan 20 1021EK Amsterdam The Netherlands www.dasarts.nl

Photo: Nellie de Boer

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Recently, the international master of Theatre DasArts moved across the waters of the IJ and set foot in Amsterdam North. This part of the city traditionally has been the ‘wrong side of the water’, but now things are changing. The North is booming and gentrification looms. our programme ‘Talking with Places’ was about getting to know the new environment and responding to it through art. How could we turn a new place into a home? Through field trips, workshops and assignments, the participants were challenged to intrude, discover and respond. In this magazine we share the experiences and insights that were part of that.