TH. & K. WILDNER

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Th. & K. Wildner

RAI Railway Station | Thomas Wildner (1966, Essen, Germany) & Dr Kathrin Wildner (1965, Essen, Germany)

As an artist, Thomas Wildner works with principles of system and coincidence. He applies these principles in public space, for example to the movements of people who use that space, or when he himself also participates in that space through an intervention or performance and thus influences it.

Kathrin Wildner obtained her doctorate with ethnographic research on the use of a square in Mexico City. She has worked together with her brother Thomas on several projects. The various qualities of the experience of public space interests her; in addition to the theatrical, at times experimental, daily usage of urban spaces, she also investigates the memories, experiences and cultural symbols that play a role in this usage. She incorporates this information obtained from the micro level into the usual scientific macro models.

TRANSISTATION
Kathrin Wildner & Thomas Wildner

In the 1960s, the present urban development area of Zuidas was still at the edge of the city, where sports fields and parks gradually gave way to countryside. At that time, in order to relieve the burden on the limited space in Amsterdam’s city centre, the RAI exhibition centre (1961), the Vrije Universiteit, churches, cloisters and other educational institutions were one by one relocated to the southern edge of the city, which could be reached by train or by car via the ring road (1977). Nowadays the historical city centre of Amsterdam is mostly a museum and shopping centre. Spread along the periphery of the city are the new urban and multifunctional centres. The heart of the Zuidas is formed by the Zuid-WTC rail station, around which hotels, bank and office complexes are being built and planned for the future.

In the current situation, transportation is still one of the most striking characteristics of the Zuidas. Motorways, train and metro lines run together over a raised bank that cuts straight through the future city centre, as it were. Before 2030, this entire stream of traffic stream must be shifted from above ground into a tunnel, while homes and offices are to be built above that tunnel. This traffic artery not only connects the periphery with the old city centre, Schiphol and the rest of the towns in the urban agglomeration of Western Holland, but also with other international junctions to places such as Cologne, Euralille and Paris. These axes of transportation mark this spot as a place of transit and determine the urban landscape.

We are attempting to make an inventory of the current, temporary situation in this peripheral area. Its function as a place of traffic and transit has steered us in the direction of movement, speed and rhythm. On the basis of detailed descriptions of individual situations and locales, we are doing research on questions about the characteristics of urban and public space. To that end, we looked for a place to use as a base for our observations, a workplace and experimental station for our questions, which in the first instance were open-ended.

At the end of the first platform is an unused station kiosk that has walls of glass on three sides. We moved into this glass space and set it up as a workplace with two large tables, chairs and chart-making materials. It serves as both our workplace and observation post. We sit here and observe, and in turn are observed. We give our thoughts free rein, observe in an associative manner, but also conduct systematic registrations.

Sitting in our glass observation post at RAI Station, we asked ourselves the meaning of this spot in the Zuidas. Does RAI Station form a centre in the centerless district of the Zuidas? Is RAI Station perhaps a very specific urban spot, which precisely because of aspects such as traffic, junction, movement, masses of people and anonymity, unites within itself a multiplicity of pre-eminently urban characteristics? Or are these sooner the characteristics of an extremely functional place of transport – where no daily interactions occur, no stories are told and therefore no identity is formed? So that this spot – like every ‘non-place’ – lacks every quality of urban charm.

The station is a place of transit, a transition spot between centre and periphery, a place full of motion and rhythm, a moving place, a flowing space. TRANSISTATION

FREE SPACES ARTISTS (AIR)

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