Mu-Chieh Chen (TW)
My Vernacular
Over the course of the last
three weeks Mu-Chieh has been building, adding and changing a pavilion. A
concrete slab on the pavement is the pavilion’s natural base. She ask people to
donate and exchange any kind of material, which she combined with found
material and beams from Praxis. Next to people donating material, Mu-Chieh asks
them to move elements in order to change the pavilion to their needs. “I like
the unfinished quality, some things might be stolen and everyone can add
material and ideas. It’s against my nature: every day I need to think about it
and therefore the process is quite slow, but I like it.”
In order to research
vernacular pavilions around the world, Mu-Chieh entered ‘pavilion’ in Google
Translate. She searched for pavilions that engage with their surroundings. She
selected six simple pavilions of which she gathered information through digital
and printed resources, but also instructed friends to take pictures. There are
two examples from Taiwan, one in India, one in Tibet, another in Japan and the
last in the USA.
By deducing the pavilions’
most poignant qualities, she constructed a list of qualities she would like her
own pavilion to have: it should have a social function, an interesting
structure, flexibility, movability and hospitality. How would this work out in
front of the Sandberg Instituut? (toastforge@gmail.com)
Julia Retz (BR)
An Apartment for a
Gymnastic Teacher
“I work from one image. I
look at the image over and over again and was very loyal to it. I am opening
that image by considering all its elements, each has its specific knowledge
that defines space: things within a context.” The work is a juxtaposition of space
and elements: how mixing spaces might happen.
This approach results in an
interior. Whether the elements can be used remains unclear: the interior
adheres to absence rather than presence. It is site specific, but the elements
could also be installed on a different location. “At first I searched for a
method to merge image and space, but there is no logic to it: I look at what is
necessary in the space. With the elements I screen write space.”
What a still image or a
temporary installation cannot show, movies do: they hint at the characters
surrounding the elements and draw the visitor into the work. They show how the
material reacts in time, take for instance the residue of the copper ring to
skin: a thin black line. The lady in the picture also wears a ring. Julia
selected each of the element’s materials delicately. She researches their
sensibility and tactility, but also what it might trigger in the visitor. With
her work Julia seduces the viewer to open up to spaces and tune into their
hidden narratives, fictive or real. (juliaretz@hotmail.com)
Laura Holzberg (DE)
Aligning, Unfolding,
Building, Digging, Grouping, Pulling
The objects in the pictures
perform themselves. The titles reveal the activity, the movement that created
the piece. The video reveals that the work is very physical, that it was not
realised by a group but that Laura moved the oversized pieces herself.
Action is the method. Laura
intervened in Amsterdam’s construction sites, empty lots and wasteland. She
sees these bare grounds as playgrounds. For Aligning, Unfolding, Building,
Digging, Grouping, Pulling Laura searched for
plots where Amsterdam is
expanding.
During her studies, Laura
participated in a re-enactment workshop with
Stroom (The Hague) in the context
of its exhibition programme Expanded Performance. Lara Almarcegui
(a
Rotterdam-based contemporary artist) took Studio for Immediate Spaces to work on
building sites. Both of these events fed Laura’s thinking towards
her thesis,
which deals with a research into concepts in performance art
that could be
attributed to spatial practice.
As an architect, Laura
looks for new ways and tools to deal with space. She physically rearranges
indeterminate land. The residues of
the exercises in public space are left
behind as a possible conversation with a by passer. (laura_holzberg@hotmail.com)
Christine Just (DK)
The Potential of Demolition
The perfect destroyed
space, what
could that be? Flying Walls, From Wall
to Floor, A Peek through
Floor to Floor: Christine names the qualities of
new spaces formed by
destruction and records them in detailed sketches.
The sketches function as
legends for the pictures of a destroyed model. The model was initially based on
a recently demolished building in Rotterdam, but Christine has elaborately
adapted it to become a building that is interesting to destroy. She filmed
herself demolishing it with a pavement tile.
The pictures on the table show the stages of demolition while
the colour- coded hand drawn plan illustrates the displacement of walls, doors,
pillars and floors during the process of demolition. “One thing that I have
learned, if you’re stuck, you just have to do something with it. If necessary,
destroy it!”
Buster Keaton’s film Steamboat
Bill (1928) is a key visual reference for Christine’s work: in the film a
building’s façade collapses all around Keaton – the scene became a classic
stunt in slapstick films. Christine saw the film at the beginning of her
research. Working on the model and the destruction film, it clicked: “This is
how I want my model to be demolished.” (christine_just@hotmail.com)
Dennis Schuivens (NL)
Pending Ground
Pending Ground is a research project after a strip of unintentional
collective land in North West Groningen and its creators. While visiting the
area for a kick-start graduation workshop, Dennis stumbled upon this strip and
was fascinated by its indeterminate state and its unintentional creation. The inhabitants, whose
land ends at the strip, have ignored the land registry’s hard borders. Over the
course of generations, the edge ‘happened’ to become a
53-meter-long-variable-in- width nobody’s land.
Four parties enclose the
strip: one farmer and the families in the houses on Dijksterweg 1, 5 and 7. The
strip was an entry point through the backdoor to interview everyone. Dennis
learned that the shoddy borders could be assigned to
the lack of relations
between the neighbors. The strip serves as a buffer for their privacy needs.
About the social structures that are at the birth of the anonymous piece of
land Dennis says: “I’m researching this piece of land, but also want to
intervene, to
do something that brings these people together.”
On Saturday June 22nd the
surrounding parties signed a covenant by which they agreed on the strip’s
collective use for three months (with the possibility of a yearly renewal. Dennis’ initial
offer to buy the
18 m2 strip — worth 147 euro — was not accepted by the
farmer). Dennis asked everyone to contribute to the stock of the strip in order to harvest the strip’s produce
for a shared meal at the 22nd of September, when the covenant officially ends.
The strip’s stock for this
season consists of: pumpkin plants,
fertilizer, a wheelbarrow, rolls of
wire, chicken wire and rocket plants. With thanks to Wongema. (dennisschuivens@gmail.com)
Haruka Uemura (JP)
Milk City
Via a small door you enter
a utopian space. A location without scale made from milk. This community
consists of houses, a living situation and a research into the relation between
a house and the surrounding landscape. The milk-plastic caves reminisce of vernacular
architecture.
Haruka researched the use
of dairy products in The Netherlands. Since she is
Japanese, she is not
accustomed to the omnipresence of dairy. The current debate on dealing with the
overproduction and resulting waste
of dairy sparked her to search for
possibilities to make use of the milk waste.
Isamu Noguchi’s Moere
Mountain — a 62-meter high mountain made out of waste — provided a pivoting
point in her thinking about using waste as building material. “Places used to
be dirty; nowadays we only sit in our clean apartments and keep the dirt away
from our houses. If we want to live together with so many different people on
small areas, we have to get our hands dirty. I want to research how to bring
fungus and waste material into the field of construction.” (trut-nijimasu@hotmail.com)
Sahar Mohammadrezazadeh
(IR)
No Space
The five
dual videos (approximately three minutes each) are descriptions and visualisations
of locations that Sahar experienced under self-hypnosis. In Iran where Sahar is
originally from, the power of the mind is believed in more strongly than in the
West.
The practice of self-hypnosis is normally paired with a strong diet and
extensive physical exercise to have
the right physique in order to undergo the
hypnosis.
In No Space, Sahar
undergoes self-hypnosis in places that everybody knows: public or semi-public
spaces such as a tunnel, basement, forest, a staircase. Under hypnosis
one
actively notices other things, qualities we normally ignore: there
is no logic;
there is no judgment, measurement, weight, light or colour (for instance, under
hypnosis the eyes do not perceive colour, because that
is a quality that is
understood by
the mind, therefore the visualization videos are in black and
white).
After the first four films, Sahar
made the closing chapter, which
is
set at a canal. She tries to open
up to the space, but this time not under
hypnosis: “It is not that sophisticated, but I had a lot of
fun.”
The small screens show Sahar
under self-hypnosis, and the large projection shows visualisations of
what she
experiences: an attempt to bring about the qualities we do not normally connect
to. To create these visualisations she uses as little material as possible: the
materiality of the film is linked to the qualities of the space she describes.
She therefore uses her hands, paper, paint, fabric, oil, clay, water and smoke.
(sr3207@yahoo.com)