Over the water from Amsterdam Centraal sits Noord, the largest borough in Amsterdam. Home to a dissolved shipping industry, its ancestral memory a landscape of polders, farmlands, gallows and garden cities, it now stands at a threshold. As planners and developers swing their gaze towards this huddled mass of rooftops, they see towers, cafés, and waterfront living.

Weak Signals, Wild Cards is a commissioning project and exhibition by the participants of de Appel Curatorial Programme 08/09. Set in Amsterdam Noord, it invites ten artists and a number of speakers from other fields to react to the given plans for the area and conjure a set of alternative futures. The artists have created works for and from their envisioned future contexts, while the speakers will foretell their imagined futures of Amsterdam Noord, from the perspectives of their expertise.

The title of this project uses two terms from futurology. Weak signals form a pattern of phenomena that serves as an indicator of possible future developments. Wild cards refer to events that are difficult to predict but have a high impact. We are not alone in attempting to predict a future: Amsterdam Noord is currently faced with a bevy of visions of its imminent regeneration. The predictions being made revolve dizzyingly around of the ‘Creative City’, which implicates not only artists but an expanded creative subjectivity in its conception of a society made up of self-reliant, resourceful individuals on a constant quest for self-improvement. This combined vision of the future ‘Creative City’ is so strongly anticipated and visualised that one gets the feeling that one could already inhabit the space of this mirage.

Yet the criticality of the current global economic circumstances provides an opportunity to not only to question, but also to remake the foundations being laid. If the conditions on which urban regeneration is based no longer hold fast, it becomes necessary to rethink what other kinds of urban structures, environments, and imagined communities might be possible. What spoken and unspoken social and economic roles are currently presumed to be played by art in the ‘Creative Industries’ and their commissioning processes in city development? In the light of the current economic uncertainty, what other kinds of future communities are possible beyond those envisioned by private property developers? What kind of public artwork would be made for these imagined communities, and under what conditions would it be produced?

The works, talks, performances and events in the exhibition will create a set of speculated futures, composing a common body of imagination. In contrast to art’s current and widespread instrumentalisation within schemes of urban regeneration, Weak Signals, Wild Cards seizes the potential of art to slip through time and form itself in response to multiple unforeseen possibilities. The contributions are not finished works or statements, in that they are documents of a society that is still to emerge. And yet, there they are: their arrival will allow a rethinking of the present.

Weak Signals, Wild Cards represents the third year of the de Appel Curatorial Programme’s shift to context-responsive curating. de Appel Curatorial Programme 2008/09 has taken up the task of responding to Amsterdam Noord.

de Appel Curatorial Programme 2008/09 is Clare Butcher, Lilian Engelmann, Mia Jankowicz, Christina Li, Ana Nikitović and Ji Yoon Yang.

 

 

Click here to view LIKE A HOLE IN THE HEAD: cheap advice for Amsterdam-Noord

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In Dutch with English subtitles, LIKE A HOLE IN THE HEAD … refrains from giving advice to the future community of Amsterdam-Noord and responds more to the role artists play in gentrification. Opening with the statement, “AMSTERDAM-NOORD—NEVER HEARD OF IT,” and continuing with punchy and humorous commentary, it develops into an elucidation about ignorance—which is fundamentally part of all artwork. YHCHI claims it is erroneous to believe that the creative and critical voice of artists are visionary. Instead, they see the work by artists as wildly speculative, naive, and an inapt political tool for, in the case of Amsterdam-Noord, urban gentrification. Nevertheless, despite their claim that art is a placebo for complex social issues the piece LIKE A HOLE IN THE HEAD can provoke critical discussions.

LIKE A HOLE IN THE HEAD … employs YHCHI’s usual black-on-white animated text accompanied with jazzy music. However in this artwork they use an unusual musical score that has irregular syncopation and improvisational rhythms. The texts are not synchronized with the music and sometimes the subtitles do not correspond with the texts, reflective of the spontaneous artist’s mind.

The Web, as a pioneering (virtual) space for public art, already used as another vehicle to directly reach audiences is evolving the commonplace art-world mediation of public space and audience. Refusing the Internet’s rhetoric of exchange, YHCHI present a furious one-way production to their viewers. YHCHI responds to the web viewers' usual tendency to read quickly when online by creating fast-moving, densely spaced text that can evoke an anxiety-like reaction from the viewer. This pulsating visualization is to stimulate and question reality.

Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries is a two-artist collective. Their work is commonly classified as web-art and is characterised by fast-moving, text-based animation composed in Macromedia Flash. A mix of animated red or black and white typography, a monochromatic background, jazz music and humour is the basis for their complex and evocative stories. These narratives offer compelling stories about sex, violence, alienation, identities and ideologies.

Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries live and work in Seoul.

www.yhchang.com

 

 

Let’s Make Singapore Our Garden: The luxuriant greenery that Singapore enjoys today is no accident of nature. Neither did our Garden City happen overnight. It took some 40 years of strong political will and the sweat and toil of many to sustain the effort. Singapore’s development into a Garden City started four decades ago with the establishment of the greening programme. The driving force behind this was the former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew who identified a green Singapore as a key competitive factor in attracting foreign invest- ments to the country. — from the website of The National Parks Board, Singapore

Shifting the focus from Amsterdam- Noord to Southeast Asia, Heman Chong’s book is a 200-page photographic examination of a park in Singapore. The park chosen to be appropriated appears wild, but is in fact entirely planned, down to the last leaf or the last clump of soil. It is later revealed that a large imposing housing structure provides the logic for this park.

Implicit in this document is the colonial, territorial or regulatory aspects of the survey- or’s gaze. The space depicted is appropriated by sight, leading to a further consumption of it through the dramaturgy of the book. Yet the usage of this park in relation to the context of the exhibition and Amsterdam-Noord remains ambivalent as the images that permeate throughout the book stay solely as a ‘survey’ where the appropriative action is lost.

Heman Chong’s art practice involves an investigation into the philosophies, reasons and methods of individuals and communities imagining the future. Charged with a conceptual drive, this research is then adapted into objects, images, installations, situations or texts.

Heman Chong lives and works in Singapore/Berlin.

www.hemanchong.com

Design Negation will give a presentation on the basis of the concerns of their research project, which is about finding new vocabularies and aesthetic possibilities for design to formulate a political negation. Their presentation ex- trapolates from the current wave of populist public opinion and politics in the Netherlands to imagine a future using the rhetoric of their research and design practice.

Currently, most design gestures fulfil, even if they are ‘dressed in dissent’, an affir- mative role in relation to their social and politi- cal surroundings. In a society whose rightwing politicians claim that they have simple and effective answers to the social, political and cultural implications of immigration, Design Negation formulate and execute a series of media campaigns while unveiling and decod- ing the hidden agendas and propagandas masked in popular design language. Judging with the trends that are prevalent in the current neoliberal society, they will speculate on the role design will play in politics and social rela- tions.’

Design Negation is set up by Daniël van der Velden, advising researcher in the Design department of the Jan van Eyck Academie, and includes Cornelia Durka, Ghalia Elsrakbi, Merijn Oudenampsen, and Ziga Testen. Design Negation aim to find new vocabularies and aesthetic possibilities for the design of political negation, and aims to respond to the current wave of populist public opinion and politics in the Netherlands. While most design gestures fulfil - even if they are ‘dressed in dissent’ - an affirmative role in relation to their social and political surroundings, the potentially critical stance in design has increasingly become a matter of armchair debates among experts. Design Negation consists of creative, intellectual and practical research and production that look for possibilities to set up a design regime of negation. The project designs for a number of organisations in the Netherlands and abroad whose social and political objectives might benefit from dedicated artistic research.

Design Negation is a research project based in Amsterdam and Maastricht.

Three-dimensional questions is an assortment of objects and materials forming an interface. Builder’s sand and a tinted window represent the start of a construction site, with an invitation to the public to engage in a dialogue with things that ‘talk’. Drawing on her interest in interactivity and materiality on the expanding field of materiality, Dröge Wendel conceives of an ‘Oracle’. A place where, ‘high up over the rooftops of Amsterdam, architects, commis- sioners, city planners, designers as well as other individuals can consult objects about themselves—a place that helps to formulate the essential questions when it comes to (the future of) things.’ The artist was inspired by the studio of Amsterdam-Noord-based public sculptor, Andre Volten, who left maquettes, interspersed with personal affects such as toothbrushes, lining the window ledges of his living studio.

Dröge Wendel interrogates ‘the tools and materials the artist works with, the surround- ings she works in, the things she sees and has seen before, the things that are in the mind of the commissioner,’ and how crucial a role these factors play in the future of the design of public space. To what extent can a public sculpture influence the way a local community experiences their neighbourhood and the materials around them? Inherently, Dröge Wendel’s installation challenges the untouch- able nature of ‘art world’ objects versus the familiarity of ‘real’, everyday things, asking what they really do, how they may determine group process and interaction.

Yvonne Dröge Wendel is concerned with the relationship between people and objects, and the quest for challenging new ways of relating to things. She sets up experimental encounters and aims to capture what it is that objects actually do. Dröge Wendel original focus was familiar, everyday objects, and in 1992 she married Wendel, a decorative cabinet, whose name she officially bears. Later she began to use objects that were more neutral in their significance, objects with fewer or with no readily identifiable characteristics. Active participation by the user is central to her recent work, creating objects and scenarios that await the meanings that they will acquire in the perception of the viewers. She also works on commissions for public space, and is an advisor for art in public space at Stroom -Centre for Art and Architecture in The Hague.

Yvonne Dröge Wendel lives and works in Amsterdam.

www.yvonnedrogewendel.nl

Famed examine the contradictory nature of artistic utopias and forms of resistance. The sculptural element in the space functions as an autonomous display and architectural intervention, attaching itself to, whilst simultaneously attempting to modify, the spatial logic of the former Shell canteen. The text - The Nature Theatre of Oklahoma is taken from Franz Kafka's novel Amerika (1927), with the structure implying a stage, and thus the entering of a differing reality. Accompanying this is the video work, designed to be shown in full daylight and remaining black for all but four seconds of its four minute duration. The sound of cicadas accomanies the approach of a vehicle, whose headlights briefly illuminate the scene before driving off. In combination, these elements refer to the individual's sense of perdition and search for home in a system s/he doesn't understand.

The artist collective Famed was founded in 2003, and are made up of Sebastian M. Kretzschmar, Kilian Schellbach and Jan Thomaneck. Famed’s different exhibition scenarios always take as their starting point an intensive examination of spaces in their physical, social and political dimension. Reacting on the specific situation, they develop spatially- and context-specific works, combining architectural-sculptural, textual-pictorial and performative approaches.

Famed live and work in Liepzig and Rostock.

www.famed.us

flyingCity have set up Creative Development Asia (CDA), a future job agency for Koreans seeking employment in Amsterdam-Noord. In view of the cultural, housing and social developments at play in the area, CDA aims to be a bridge for Koreans to be a part of an exciting process of labour exchange. To pursue any goal of making the ‘Creative City’ happen, the Creative Industries of Amsterdam-Noord would need more immigrants and creative capital to materialise this vision. Working from the idea that the financial crisis begun in 2008 had a significant impact on the developments of Amsterdam- Noord, CDA’s activities open up the possibility of considering the benefits of bringing in an international community.

The services provided by CDA include advertisements in job search engines and websites in Korea alongside postings of job op- portunities in Amsterdam-Noord. The field of the Creative Industries has expanded to cover jobs in tourism, service industries, entertainment, cultural networking and social enterprises. Profiles of applicants, the advertisements and CDA’s mission statement are installed in the exhibition space.

The establishing of CDA as an ongoing research is a critical commentary on the future of the multinational corporation stemming from the frequently colonial roots of the flows of international labour exchange. CDA holds up the projected personal fantasies of Koreans against the reality of European cities.

flyingCity started as an artists’ group which researches and critiques the urban culture and the reality of urban geography, which is now growing into a creative design studio. flyingCity is specifically interested in the transformation of urban community influenced by the rapid formation of urban structure in Seoul, and alternative ways of thinking about the city in ongoing growth conditioned by over-density and over-accumulation. In the meantime, it has tried to delineate the process of natural growth of Seoul with site specific performances, mental maps showing utopic urban planning and photographic documentations, which all aim to critique the urban landscape of Seoul. This leads to the rearticulating of concepts such as 'Psychogeography' and 'Drift'. On the basis of in-depth research flyingCity is trying to stimulate the collective imagination and to appropriate the dominant mode of urbanity into a platform for smaller scale creative practice, which we now call 'Formless Construction'.

flyingCity live and work in Seoul, Korea.

www.flyingcity.org

 

 

For Weak Signals, Wild Cards, Andreja Kulunčić initiates the first phase of MY AMSTERDAM, a research project made in reaction to the Amsterdam Tourist Board’s campaign titled I Amsterdam, which sells a class-specific vision of Amsterdammers as people of leisure, culture, and consumption. The project aims to assess and reinterpret the position of people who do not fit in projected visions of gentrified society – or who ‘Is notsterdam’ - activating these ‘outsiders’ as subjects so as to avoid additional ‘objective’ observation.

Amsterdam-Noord is taken as a case study for the broader application of ideas. The research will consist of three main phases: a) asking how inhabitants understand the campaign I Amsterdam; b) the forming of a collaborative working group of interested citizens to provide a set of contrasting or supplementary perspectives on the future described in current gentrification plans; and c) the adjustment and tailoring of the subject implied in I Amsterdam. These results will feed into media campaigns that would aim, ultimately, to intersect with policy and planning for the area.

Andreja Kulunčić’s practice is characterised by an exploration of new models of sociability and communication, as well as an interest in socially engaged themes, confrontation with different audiences, and collaboration on collective projects. She sets up her own interdisciplinary networks, seeing artistic work as a process of cooperation and self-organisation, often asking the audience actively to participate in and thereby "finish" the work.

She has participated in major international exhibitions such as Documenta 11 (Kassel, Germany, 2002), Manifesta 4 (Frankfurt/Main, 2002), the 8th International Istanbul Biennial (Turkey, 2003), The American Effect (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2003), Liverpool Biennial (UK, 2004), the Day labor exhibition at P.S.1 (New York, 2005) and others.

Andreja Kulunčić lives and works in Zegreb.

www.andreja.org

The two wooden sculptures made by Alon Levin are separate but related works. Both works are proposed as the resultant objects of unspecified processes in which the artist is deployed for propaganda. They reflect Levin’s view towards the politicians’ deployment of the cultural industry as a contemporary alternative for propaganda. Levin is critical towards such a turn in politics, where instead of using dictatorial slogans, symbols and icons, politicians let the Creative Industries do the job for them.

Ultimately, the future political scenario from which these works emerge is left unexplained. Let’s Say We’re Talking About a Possible Past to the Future Here appears as a rack or storage for flag-shaped panels, whereas Things Contemporary consists of an open wooden crate resembling those for art shipping, filled with coloured panels facing each other. Are they protest kits, ready to be packed and shipped to the scene of resistance at a moment’s notice? Or are they, like elements of the former Shell Kantine, remnants of some complex corporate signifying system? Their very ambiguity speaks of a the potential for the visual language of both corporate and radical communication to converge at some point in the future. Perhaps also they are archives, the storage units of a movement long put to rest. Together the two works emphasise the temporality both of art and politics.

Alon Levin makes large-scale installations, often of wooden structures, that refer to the systems of thinking we tend to take for granted. Philosophical, economical, and social theories of progress and growth, organising principles, and ideas of modernist utopias are some of the recurring themes in his work. Levin examines the images, metaphors, and symbols that represent these concepts, and explores the contradictions and failings of their systems. The work can be seen as a narration about the build-up, breakdown, and possibly the reinvention of meaning itself.

Alon Levin lives and works in New York and The Hague.

Both of Laura Oldfield Ford’s works appear as documentation and imagery coming from an imagined social space in the year 2013. London has been evacuated after a sustained period of bombing and those who remain are effectively living in open prisons. This project follows a group of itinerants fleeing increas- ingly hostile conditions for Amsterdam-Noord where huge temporary cities have emerged in response to the crisis to house refugees. The carefully planned garden cities harking back to Ebenezer Howard are subsumed into the labyrinthine sprawl of the new mobile cities. Luxury apartments left stranded in the economic downturn become central structures in vast squatted communities. These cities are run collectively by various anarchist and leftist groupings; what is presented is the gathered archival material of their activities.

This project is to be viewed through the lens of class relations on a global scale relating to what Fredric Jameson calls a ‘cartography of the absolute’. It is a cognitive mapping that tries to examine individual situations and personal narratives within a global context, ‘to enable a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society’s structures as whole’.

Through drawings, psychogeographic ‘drifts’, and her zine Savage Messiah, Laura Oldfield Ford is known for her politically active and poetic engagement with urban space as a site of social antagonism. Oldfield Ford has focused primarily on issues of gentrification, urban regeneration and social antagonism in the city. Her works subjectively map the city in its intensive state of movement and flux, existing at the point of transition from aesthetic practice to a radical critique of urbanism, and often employing a strong DIY punk aesthetic. She regards her work as diaristic; the drawings and writings combine seemingly disparate elements in a process akin to montage, allowing it to be read as a palimpsest, a site of perpetual writing and over-writing.

Laura Oldfield Ford lives and works in London.

www.lauraoldfieldford.com
www.savagemessiahzine.com

Historically Amsterdam-Noord has served as a battleground for modernist ideals to either emancipate or subjugate the masses. From authoritarian resocialisation camps, to the socialist ideals of physical education through sports and leisure; from the communist bul- warks on the waterfront ship industries, to the present regeneration of the area by means of Creative Industries. What has changed is that the local population no longer forms the base ingredient of social engineers, but the building materials themselves. Real estate itself has come to dominate the desires of politicians and policymakers.

Merijn Oudenampsen is a freelance researcher. He is currently doing a research project at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, investigating populism as part of the project Design Negation. He studied political science and sociology at the UvA in Amsterdam, has written and still writes regularly on the politics of urban development and has been involved in organising several conferences and initiatives around flexibilisation.

Merijn Oudenhampsen lives and works in Amsterdam.

Little Millet: Puck Verkade. The Commune: Coco Julie Havermans, Roos Mikx, Suzanne Noesen. Camera and editing: Maarten Theuwkens.

“Question: Is a bohemian in the job market still a bohemian?”

Little Millet is a film that records frag- ments of conversation between an empty building and the younger self of American author and feminist activist Kate Millet. Echoing parts of Millet’s biography, the ‘little Millet’ finds her meaning becoming lost in the medium. Misunderstood by her commune, her family, the city, the press - she creates an illu- sion of time-bending space that exists only in her mind, a limitless arena where her memories degenerate into rhapsody and mania.

This fictionalised narrative could be an alternative future path, forked from Millet’s history. It is derived from a series of interviews and newspaper articles from the 1990s describing the role Millet took in a tenants’ dispute against the Cooper Square Urban Renewal Scheme in New York. Best known for her 1970 dissertation Sexual Politics, Kate Millet started buying and restoring farm prop- erty near Poughkeepsie, New York to use as a bolt-hole. The project became the Women’s Art Colony Farm, a community of female artists and writers where she currently earns a living selling Christmas trees and screen prints.

Little Millet is the first part of an ongoing research into the life and political activism of Kate Millet. Maria Pask primarily works on projects that interpret the nature of collective creativity, empowerment and the live moment. Working with open formats and social structures, Pask employs a broad array of methods ranging from sculpture and film to creative workshops, scripts and live performances. The work itself playfully sets up social relations and develops a complex, experimental methodology that questions the hierarchical nature of established cultural and social orders. Overall, Pask constructs projects that highlight the necessity of public expression from non- performing enthusiasts.

Maria Pask lives and works in Amsterdam.

Oda Projesi means ‘room project’ in Turkish. Oda Projesi deal with the different usages of the room in search for the ways to connect everyday life with artistic practices. As Mladen Stilinovic has said: “If the gallery is just a room, then money is just paper.” Therefore the notion of a room refers not only to space itself, but to understanding of terms “private” and “public” in the complex set of interrelating contexts. However, their 45m space in Galata, Istanbul functioned as a non-profit space with zero budget until March 2005, when Oda Projesi were evicted from the apartment due to the process of gentrification.

Since their eviction, they have adopted a mobile position and continue to constitute relations between artists and non-artists, institutions and communities living neighbor- hoods they are invited to work with. Through these projects they give form to new meeting- points using various forms of media and spaces like radio stations, books, postcards, and newspapers.

For Weak Signals, Wild Cards, Oda Projesi follow the curators’ proposition to speak about their practice and experience from the perspective of a future in which uncertainty or unprofitable activity is barely tolerable. If we follow what developers predict, how do we think about our position now? How do we live together, how do we think of doing it better and does art enable us and open possibilities in considering such notions?

Oda Projesi is an artist collaborative initiated by Özge Acıkkol, Günes Savas and Secil Yersel. Their work operates through direct contact with communities and develops relationships within the neighborhood to transform the gentrification process. Oda Projesi aim to create 'a monument composed of gestures from everyday life and layers of memories of the community. They emphasise that this always occurs together with, and not for, the participants.

Oda Projesi live and work in Istanbul.

www.odaprojesi.org

Lee Scrivner uses historical forms, clichés and references to create his future scenario. In this short satirical play the central character is a musician called Ascian, whose name refers to the people of Gene Wolf’s novel The Book of The New Sun in which the only permitted communication is the quoting of lines from the state’s constitutional books. Ascian’s reed- playing is overheard by the pompous commis- sioner Lord Garden and his aides, inspiring him to build an institution for music.

Whereas cultural activity is frequently spoken of as a state building-block, Scrivner distills a reductive and absurdist scenario from this, and exposes the self-defeating cen- tral ironies of over-regulated commissioning processes. The use of iambic pentameter and mannered – if shambolic – staging refers to cli- chéd ‘Golden Ages’ of cultural patronage, from the Elizabethan Globe Theatre to the paintings of Rembrandt van Rijn.

Lee Scrivner seeks nothing less than rearticulations of "postmodernism," "the avant-garde," "humanism" and "academia", wishing them no ill but noticing the profusion of agreed-upon dogmas welling up in the very systems that were supposed to relish throwing off such yokes. Through poetic, prosaic, musical, and theatrical projects, Scrivner takes aim at the need for irony, banksters, Big Media, and (increasingly) himself. He wrote, directed, and (with a cast of seven) performed The Sound Moneyfesto at the Serpentine Gallery’s Manifesto Marathon (October, 2008). As the writer of How to Write and Avant-Garde Manifesto, he appeared as a panelist in the A Slap in the Face of Public Taste: The Art of Manifestos debate at the British Library’s exhibition Breaking the Rules: The Printed Face of the European Avant-Garde, 1900-37 1900-37 (London, February 2008). Through his loose-knit avant-garde network The International Institute of Insomnauts (www.insomnauts.org) and his music projects Inviolet Row, Infinite Justice, and Three-Eyed Dasein, he has presented and performed work at London’s Wigmore Hall, Tate Britain, the ICA, the CCA in Glasgow, Shakespeare and Co. in Paris, and at several casinos on the Las Vegas Strip, thus balancing highbrow and lowbrow culture into a kind of horizontal unibrow.

Lee Scrivner lives and works in London.

www.leescrivner.com

 

 

Ouest-Lumière first came into existence as a private French electricity company founded in the early 1900s to serve energy to the western suburbs of Paris. Having been nationalised after the Second World War, its buildings were gradually abandoned. In 1991, a few years prior to its demolition, Yann Toma occupied the plant and eventually appropriated the company itself by 1994.

Toma’s Ouest-Lumière will sell types of ‘artistic energy’, including ‘immaterial’ energy and shares of sensual pleasure, as well as tools allowing destiny control, teleportation, invisibility, prediction of the future, and forget- fulness. In an ultimately neoliberalised future, where all creativity is a function of urban plan- ning, Toma will sell us back our artistic experi- ences and any sense of the unpredictable in neatly packaged and promptly delivered form.

Artist and researcher Yann Toma deals with economic circuits and takes up Beuys’ idea of transforming capital in art. 1991 Toma took over the Ouest-Lumière power station for new functions, and repeats this process in his recent practice of buying up post-bankruptcy banks.

Yann Toma lives and works in Paris.

 

 

Day of talks and performances
2-7pm 28th June 2009

Weak Signals, Wild Cards invites four multidisciplinary contributors to imagine the future of Amsterdam-Noord through the lens of their expertise. From the fields of urban theory, theatre making, design, political commentary, and entrepreneurship, they are all in different ways positioned to foretell Amsterdam-Noord’s ‘creative’ future.

Programme
2.00pm introduction by the curators
2.30pm Merijn Oudenampsen – Social Engineering in the North
3.15pm refreshments
3.30pm Design Negation – Design, Political Engagement, and Populist Politics
4.15pm Yann Toma – Ouest-Lumière
5.00pm refreshments
5.30pm Lee Scrivner – Lord Garden’s Masque – an Anti-Masque

Merijn Oudenampsen – Social Engineering in the North
Historically Amsterdam-Noord has served as a battleground for modernist ideals to either emancipate or subjugate the masses. From authoritarian resocialisation camps, to the socialist ideals of physical education through sports and leisure; from the communist bulwarks on the waterfront ship industries, to the present regeneration of the area by means of Creative Industries. What has changed is that the local population no longer forms the base ingredient of social engineers, but the building materials themselves. Real estate itself has come to dominate the desires of politicians and policymakers.

Design Negation – Design, Political Engagement, and Populist Politics
Design Negation will give a presentation on the basis of the concerns of their research project, which is about finding new vocabularies and aesthetic possibilities for design to formulate a political negation. Their presentation extrapolates from the current wave of populist public opinion and politics in the Netherlands to imagine a future using the rhetoric of their research and design practice. Currently, most design gestures fulfil, even if they are ‘dressed in dissent’, an affirmative role in relation to their social and political surroundings. In a society whose rightwing politicians claim that they have simple and effective answers to the social, political and cultural implications of immigration, Design Negation formulate and execute a series of media campaigns while unveiling and decoding the hidden agendas and propagandas masked in popular design language. Judging with the trends that are prevalent in the current neoliberal society, they will speculate on the role design will play in politics and social relations.

Yann Toma – Ouest-Lumière
Ouest-Lumière first came into existence as a private French electricity company founded in the early 1900s to serve energy to the western suburbs of Paris. Having been nationalised after the Second World War, its buildings were gradually abandoned. In 1991, a few years prior to its demolition, Yann Toma occupied the plant and eventually appropriated the company itself by 1994. Toma’s Ouest-Lumière will sell types of ‘artistic energy’, including ‘immaterial’ energy and shares of sensual pleasure, as well as tools allowing destiny control, teleportation, invisibility, prediction of the future, and forget- fulness. In an ultimately neoliberalised future, where all creativity is a function of urban planning, Toma will sell us back our artistic experiences and any sense of the unpredictable in neatly packaged and promptly delivered form.

Lee Scrivner – Lord Garden’s Masque – an Anti-Masque
Lee Scrivner uses historical forms, clichés and references to create his future scenario. In this short satirical play the central character is a musician called Ascian, whose name refers to the people of Gene Wolf’s novel The Book of The New Sun in which the only permitted communication is the quoting of lines from the state’s constitutional books. Ascian’s reed-playing is overheard by the pompous commissioner Lord Garden and his aides, inspiring him to build an institution for music. Whereas cultural activity is frequently spoken of as a state building-block, Scrivner distills a reductive and absurdist scenario from this, and exposes the self-defeating central ironies of over-regulated commissioning processes. The use of iambic pentameter and mannered – if shambolic – staging refers to clichéd 'Golden Ages' of cultural patronage, from the Elizabethan Globe Theatre to the paintings of Rembrandt van Rijn. This comic musical performance will be accompanied by clarinet, harp and baroque cello.

 

 

Press Releases Local interest and listings (download PDF) National and international interest (download PDF) Images from Tijdmachine, An education workshop with Noordjes Kinderkunst. Workshop took place on 13th -14th June, 2009. (Click on an image to download hi-resolution file.)
Images from Laura Oldfield Ford Savage Messiah issue 12: North London to Amsterdam-Noord. Art is the enemy of regeneration (detail). Zine (edition 500) (Click on an image to download hi-resolution file.)
More images to come.

Tijdmachine

An education workshop with Noordjes Kinderkunst, workshop 13th - 14th June, 2009.

This project is developed and conceived in close collaboration with the Noordjes Kinderkunst, and is the result of a two-day workshop with neigbourhood children. The participants built a time machine with found material from vacated houses in the area, and personal objects.

H.G. Wells’ 1895 novella The Time Machine, details a time traveller’s explorations through different ages and societies via the metal- and wood-made time machine. Despite his incredible adventures, he arrives in time to tell the stories to his dinner guests. The distant worlds accessed through time travel in The Time Machine allowed Wells to make a set of critical observations concerning the fierce industrialisation and unforgiving socio-political structure in Britain at the turn of the last century. It is precisely this imaginative chronological chaos that has inspired children from Noordjes Kinderkunst in their construction of a time machine.

Noordjes Kinderkunst was begun by Saskia Noordhuis two years ago, and is "run" by its mascot Noordje – a small girl who lives in the house at the corner of Van der Pekplein. Serving the children of the neighbourhood, art workshops are held twice a week with a programme of artist visits and exhibitions. Noordjes Kinderkunst itself is set to expand into the first children’s museum in Amsterdam Noord as part of the development of the Tolhuistuin cultural centre on the former Shell Terrain next year.

The impending plans for this museum and the children's aspirations for the neighbourhood in general, have prompted the curators of Weak Signals, Wild Cards together with Noordjes Kinderkunst and Aldo Kroese to facilitate the building of this brick-a-brack time portal, exploring what lies beyond the present transitional moment in Amsterdam Noord while still getting back in time for dinner.

The sculptures made will be on display in the Tolhuistuin garden for the duration of the exhibition.

With special thanks to: Saskia Noordhuis and Aldo Kroese.

www.noordjeskinderkunst.nl
See more images from the workshop.

 

 

Kijkruimte residency – Laura Oldfield Ford

A residency partnership with the Kijkruimte, 8th - 17th June, 2009.

Open studio 17th - 26th June, 2009.

Kijkruiimte, 15 Van der Pekstraat, Amsterdam 1031.

The Kijkruimte is run by Daniela Paes Leão and is an independently-led satellite project of the forthcoming arts centre the Tolhuistuin. Situated in Van der Pekstraat, it houses residency space as well as a versatile room for exhibition or open studio.

The Kijkruimte is a 'migratory blue point' – an offshoot of The Blue House in IJburg, a four year art project by Jeanne van Heeswijk where artists, writers, architects and researchers were invited to become inhabitants and from their own disciplines, develop a research about the growing progress of the community.

Based on this precedent and Paes Leão’s experience with the Blue House, KijkRuimte aims to provide a flexible and responsive base from which contemporary artists can develop projects in response to the locality.

KijkRuimte proposes to create a research platform that will function as a tool to reconnect what seems to be the two most important characters of the North: the multicultural population of the working-class neighbourhoods and the flourishing upcoming artistic scene, which appear to be separated creating a gap between the place and its expectations. Their proposal is to stretch the borders of these two realities, bringing them into a productive confrontation and exploring their potential connection.

Laura Oldfield Ford is the first resident artist at the Kijkruimte, using the residency as her research period for her contribution to Weak Signals, Wild Cards. Aside from the work produced for the exhibition, the sketches, ideas, and plans stemming from her residency is displayed in her open studio between 17th-26th June, allowing visitors to see work in progress.

With special thanks to Daniela Paes Leão.

www.kijkruimte.nl