These are the shows I reviewed for ArtSlant‘s Gallery Hop in January 2011.

Roger Hiorns @ Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam

Roy Villevoye, The Histories @ Motive Gallery, Amsterdam

Werken Pop-Up Show @ Serieuze Zaken Gallery, Amsterdam

(Originally posted on Ymag)

Marjetica Potrč’s work stems from contemporary art in two directions. First of all, in context: the Slovenian artist is also an architect, and her art often takes place in form of building.
Her museum installations are case studies in world architecture, concerned with issues of community and sustainability. If these pieces bring diverse aesthetic styles from the urban fabric where the were born to the sanitized gallery space, her site-specific interventions transcend contemporary art’s fascination with the place, carving deeper into ground and participation.

New Orleans: Shotgun House with Rainwater-Harvesting Tank, 2008

Potrč doesn’t engage public space with big scale installations for people to behold (and maybe to socialize around), she tries to create infrastructures tapping into local natural resources, like water. Rooftop rice fields, community gardens, wind turbines. The artist wants to leave a mark deeper than a memory, actual tools activating virtuous circles in their contexts.

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(This is the second part of a two-part interview. Go read the first!)

NB: One thing I’m really interested about is also the fact that, after creating the Bijlmer Euro, you also want to expand the project to other nations that are involved with the Bijlmer, like Suriname. I was wondering if you were thinking of another type of money exchange that doesn’t involve the physical exchange of bills, to create a more global kind of banking system.

CN: Yeah, totally. That’s exactly what we’re trying to do. Having a semi-digital object that has this weird thing attached. Now telephone company are starting to become banks, right? So people are sending minutes to Suriname, to their relatives. When sending money via something like Western Union, you get a little percentage cut. When you send 100, the person on the other end gets 97. There is no taxing paid to governments on telephone minutes. It’s a big growth area, but also the possibility for a diasporic banking system. I’d like to become a bank.
There are 20 different nationalities living in this kind of post-colonial context, and those communities have really strong connections. There are family members, but there are also business relationships. There is a real possibility to have a whole socialist banking, a diasporic banking system. In terms of monetary value, they are much higher than global aid, and that has such a profound effect on how the world will develop. So I think developing a system that either cuts a lower percentage or is totally free, depending on what kind of model we go for, it could be super powerful. We can essentially put Western Union out of business. It’s possible, I mean.
There’s a really interesting change happening in banks. People talk about micro-finance, something that really helps a local area. Like the Bijlmer Euro, but there is no global transaction. Because a place like the Bijlmer, geographically, has routes to so many different places. If you really try to map the Bijlmer, it looks like an octopus, with lots of fingers. We should try and find a way to present it as a strength, and not a weakness. Here in Holland there is a lot of discourse, you know, about foreigners, and people are coming and seeing that kind of global context as a real strength, and I think it’s really powerful. The Bijlmer is normally seen as the Dutch Bronx, but I like to see it as the Dutch Nasdaq, which is a different, more complex identity for the neighborhood. (more…)

Christian Nold has been working with mapping crowds for a long time now, but what really interested me about the project he realized in Amsterdam, the Bijlmer Euro, is its very materialistic root in the traffic of money.

Nold played on the notion of local currency and combined it with an information visualization tool that allowed him to track the special money he created for the Bijlmer, by using RFID tags and special readers imported from China. By creating this trade circuit in the neighborhood, the artist wanted to encourage investment in the local economy and the representation of the area’s identity.

Despite the project’s success has been limited by its own complexity (maybe the visualization aspect was a bit too high-tech for everybody to figure out) and funding (unluckily it was tested for a few months only), the Bijlmer Euro is an interesting experiment and Nold’s intention is to further develop it in the future.

What follows is an interview I had with him some time ago. Since the recording I took was not very good, a few portions are missing. Still, I believe the juice is all there and I thank him very much for being available to do it. (more…)

(Originally posted on Ymag)

MVRDV, Silodam, Amsterdam

In his book Recombinant Urbanism, urban design scholar David Grahame Shane describes the contemporary metropolis as “a layered structure of heterotopic nodes and networks.” Shane utilizes the foucauldian concept of heterotopia in relation to the enclave and the armature. Heterotopias mix “the stasis of the enclave with the flow of an armature” and within them “the balance between these two systems is constantly changing”. Quoting Foucault, Shane describes the emergence of heterotopias as a shift towards a system of “sites” – that is “relations of proximity between points or elements” – that replaced “extension”, creating a world in which space “takes for us the form of relations between sites.” Shane’s insistence on network and sites can’t but suggest a growing isomorphism between the global city and the Internet, between its flow of people and goods and that of information. The shipping container is probably the best example to demonstrate such intersections.

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