FREE SPACES ZUIDAS AIR
Zuidas Free Spaces Artists In Residence 2010 - fourth edition
Participating artists: Lieven de Boeck, Frank Havermans, Sachi Miyachi, Shinji Otani and Tom Tlalim.
I.c.w.. Fonds BKVB, VU Amsterdam/VU Brussel, MuziekCenrum Nederland/NFPK+, Stroom Den Haag
The Zuidas continues to be a challenge as a major urban development area. The fourth edition of Zuidas Free Spaces AIR once again presents art as an inspiration for reflection and projection.
The project offers insight into the ideas and ambitions steering the design of this area, responds to and comments upon them. This provides further insight into the consequences of policy and planning. It poses and presents independent questions, insights, conclusions and viewpoints, things of value to the thinking and policy on the Zuidas as a developing area and as a new city district of Amsterdam.
As such, each edition of Free Spaces is relevant for a wide audience: it offers a deeper experience of our present public domain. It is relevant as a catalyser of knowledge with regard to the urban design of our future public space. The Zuidas Free Spaces AIR indeed stands for an emphatic involvement of autonomous imagination in the realization of this public domain.
In collaboration with partner institutes, the Zuidas Free Spaces AIR invites artists to stay for a period of five months in the residencies of the Virtual Museum Zuidas in the former Sint Nicolaas Monastery in order to relate to this environment on the spot, with the emphasis on urban design, architecture and/or public space.
This always turns out to be a difficult task. As an artist thrown into such an exciting playing field on your own, what do you hold onto and what anchors come adrift? How hermetic and/or flexible is the urban planning? What are the blind spots of the policymakers and developers? For whom is this new area of the city intended and who is behind that intention? What makes a city alive, and can something like that be planned anyhow? How do you integrate a new city into an old one? Do the ambitions actually go far enough?
The artists pose surprising questions and come up with sharp answers. During their residency in the Zuidas, they develop a relation with this domain and take a stance of their own. They make work specific to the site and context. They offer well-founded views and inventive perspectives.
The results are presented in the former Sint Nicolaas Chapel in an exhibition that concludes the artists’ stay in the Zuidas. Each Zuidas Free Spaces AIR exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue that gives an overview of these results.
For the first time, this publication also includes the contribution of a guest writer, Stan Majoor. This is an attempt, in line with the policy of Onomatopee, to link deeper perspective and presentation. Stan Majoor is an assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam and director of its bachelor in geography and planning, and has done extensive research on the Zuidas. In his essay he describes the background, development and potential of this new urban area and makes a case for an integral approach to the Zuidas that includes room for values which are (still) underrepresented in the current plans, despite the fact that they are essential for the development of the Zuidas and the public domain. This argument forms an interesting prelude to the artists’ contributions.
With their observations and views, the artists put their fingers on sore spots in ways that are sometimes playful and ironic, sometimes serious or critical. They warn of the danger of a monoculture focussed on money and success, raise essential urban design questions, offer food for thought, present alternative solutions, and sometimes even a concrete plan. But above all, they call attention to the human dimension and the reality of ordinary, everyday life.
The project thus offers an opening for further development of relations with residents and policymakers. Zuidas Free Spaces AIR hopes for a Zuidas with different neighbourhoods and atmospheres, with history and identity, with room for everybody.
Participation through invitation
Considering the objectives and ambitions of this residency project, there can be no question of an open tender. Artists are invited to participate in this project at the recommendation of the Virtual Museum and it's partners.
