THE PROJECT,

The assignment called ‘making a public’ is based on art in the public space. Within this assignment I had to create a work/project based on research and discovering an area in Rotterdam called Vierhaven.
The purpose of this assignment is to develop a project/work in a field of my interest in which I can take a stand in the public space. It is important to investigate systems and approaches, behaviour in space and time. The public is a central point within this major, experiment my work with audience and no-audience.

This project started by discovering the area Vierhaven,
This was the beginning of my process. What I thought was interesting is the map of Rotterdam itself. So I pointed out the spots of my walks and I took pictures from the different spots. The thing that really got my attention were all sorts of lines you see in the city, lines we use in traffic, line patterns in houses or the electrical cables the tram uses.

I decided to connect the line related pictures to the map of Rotterdam. While doing this the map of Rotterdam got expend.
I drew the new ‘paths’ to fully connect the pictures with the map. This process is visualised in a one-minute movie. After this I was really interested in the drawn lines on the map so I decided to draw them over and over again on paper, which created patterns. The idea behind this was connected to walking because u never walk one path exactly the same for
the second or any other time.

With the idea of creating new paths I decided to make an alternative map of Rotterdam. This is how I came back to a new research point. I researched the historical structure of Rotterdam, how roads and paths changed over the years. Through the research it felt like everything is layered up with the outcome how Rotterdam is today. I wanted to create a new layer to Rotterdam by inventing a new map. I laid down the map of Rotterdam and different drawings. With a light source
I could see all the layers and tried to connect the drawings with the map.

After a long trail of research I needed to find a way to bring this back to the public space, so I decided to do a performance on the street. The performance was about me taping lines (the lines refer to the drawings) on the streets of Rotterdam. The idea behind this is about adding an extra layer to Rotterdam. This turned out to be an abstract movie about the documentation of the performance.

The result of everything was shown in a presentation.
My research was a huge visualized part of the actual performance, so I decided to add that to the presentation which created a frame around the documentation of the performance.

This project was a huge eye-opener for me in a way of creating a new working process. Normally I research a topic until
I come up with a concept. After the concept I immediately start visualizing. With this project my research became partly the visualisation, which created a nice coherence between al my research and the performance material.

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