City Circles, photography by Cloud Mine Photography Amsterdam (source website)
City Circles explorations – WOW/ Design Academy Eindhoven
Introduction
For two years, I was an artist in residence at WOW Amsterdam. This entails that I lived and worked there as a visual artist. During my time, I participated in several initiatives in the neighbourhood, like WOW store and We make the city.
The initiative City Circles by Design Academy Eindhoven (DAE) became significant for my development as an artist. It was my first encounter with urban/ social design and introduced me to practices like landscape architecture. It has changed my working direction till today.
WOW Amsterdam 2018-2020
WOW.Amsterdam illustration by Nicolas Chuard.
WOW is a former polytechnical school (HTS) next to the highway Ring West in Amsterdam. Nowadays, this dynamic building houses several enterprises:: a hostel for tourists, a restaurant, a culinary school of ROC, studios for creative businesses like ZID theatre, and AGA lab (a graphic work atelier with silk-screening, risograph print, and more.). In the middle of the WOW complex is a communal garden, where vegetables, spices and edible flowers are grown for the restaurant. The building has an exposition space and a greenhouse for meetings.
Artists who recently graduated can apply for an atelier house in WOW for two years. I was one of the artists in residence. The result is a dynamic, ever-changing environment, where the public space and the private space of the home merge into one.
City Circles
In 2019, I was for several months part of City Circles. In this project, a group of mixed WOW-residents and students of the DAE conducted field research in the neighbourhood 'de Kolenkit' in Amsterdam. The project originated by visual artist Irene Fortuyn, Ketter&Co, DAE, hosted by Wow Amsterdam and supported by the city government of Amsterdam.
“City Circles is a multidisciplinary design-driven research tool, encouraging an examination of cities within the confines of a circle with a diameter of one kilometre.”
During the first two weeks of the City Circles project, we followed lectures and tours in and through the neighbourhood ‘de Kolenkit’, after which we chose a topic to focus on. For three months, we worked towards a final presentation.
See pictures of our process here.
City Circles, (source website)
The lectures were given by:
Carolien Nevejan - Professor of Designing Urban Experience at the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences of the University of Amsterdam. She reflects on increased urban complexity and social cohesion in the context of urban experience.
In her lecture, I found her research on the rhythm in cities extremely interesting.
All our human communication goes through rhythm. In Nevejan’s regard, strangers can meet through a shared rhythm – for example by taking the same bus every day. She questions how we can design environments that bring citizens closer together and how we can find shared languages.
Zef Hemel - Professor of Urban and Regional Planning (Wibaut Chair) at the University of Amsterdam. He talked about using the city as a ‘brain’, as a potential space of collective intelligence, in which planning is needed.
Hemel approaches a city as a living organism - that can grow, live, and die.
He gave us an urban history of Amsterdam and showed how de Kolenkit came into existence: a district with cheap and quickly build labourers’ houses.
Now, around 2019, Amsterdam is becoming a city-state (in the top 20 of the world) and is going through a massive transformation – which is exciting but also hard to live through as a citizen. What effect does this transformation have on ‘de Kolenkit’?
Cascoland – is an international network of designers, visual artists, performers, and academics in Amsterdam. For already ten years, Cascoland practices bottom-up urbanism in ‘de Kolenkit’. In 2007 it was marked as the worst neighbourhood in the Netherlands, according to the government statistics that looked at poverty, youth crimes, school drop-outs and more.
“Cascoland improved the quality of life in the neighbourhood through cultural interventions and involving local residents. (…) In the meantime, the Kolenkit is no longer the worst neighbourhood in the Netherlands “
Mobile Gardens, photography by Mark Weemen, (source website)
Saïd Bensellam – Saïd is named ‘Amsterdammer’ of the year in 2007. He lived all his life in the neighbourhood and runs an organisation to tackle youth problems, located in the WOW building. A documentary has been made about his practice by VPRO Tegenlicht; De ongekroonde koning van Amsterdam-West.
Saïd gave a lecture during City Circles about his experience living at ‘de Kolenkit’.
As well as what impact the governmental strategies can have on the residents: for example, disrupting social coherence by replacing (houses of) citizens.
Humberto Schwab – Founder of Socratic design and running the Socratic Design Academy. Schwab gave us pragmatic tools to transform our manner of doing research in the neighbourhood. I experienced it as inspiring, social and nourishing – people truly listen and think together.
“Socratic design solves the paradox that the thinking we use to eliminate problems is often the cause of these problems. The liberating effect of the disciplined Socratic Design method transforms any group of rational individuals into a collective intelligent body. They overcome ego focus, addictive thoughts, stubborn assumptions, and chronic disagreement. It creates maximum space for imaginative thinking.”
City Circles - Socratic Design by Humberto Schwab, photography by Cloud Mine Photography Amsterdam (source website
Influence on my work City Circles changed my view of the city; it was no longer merely a subject of my personal encounters and imagination. But it opened a social, communal, political and historical way of looking at my direct surroundings.
My chosen subject to investigate the neighbourhood was 'flow' (movement).
Flow and rhythm were everywhere I looked: for example, a small concert of Red Bull Cans blowing in the wind. These rhythms have sound, give sensations to your body and have a smell – it is sensorial.
My favourite example of rhythm happens during the bulky waste days of Amsterdam; when waste can be left on the sidewalk and is picked up by garbage cars. This is a weekly social dance of exchange, in which residents meet, talk, find or give away. It is a moment in which houses are turned inside out. The objects that are thrown away, tell something about the people who live there.
Could this re-use of material become design/art - a way of communicating in the public domain, and fulfil social needs through exchange? To take this to the test, I started a ‘moving landscape project’ from bulky waste for local residents.
My works take a lot of time to evolve. Therefore, I was not able to present them during City Circles unfortunately.
The work Nerve and Body in Landscape are the results, and the projects are still growing today - you can see and read on the Nerve sculpture page, and on the news page.
City Circles, photography by Iris Woutera
Editor of this blog Kim Hoogterp
Comments