Multitude Stop | Nabuurs&VanDoorn

Multitude Stop | Nabuurs&VanDoorn

In response to an invitation to participate in the exhibition Be(com)ing Dutch at the Van Abbemuseum Nabuurs and Van Doorn proposed to exhibit outside museum walls and create three minimal interventions in public space. The questions posed by the curators, “What does ‘Being Dutch' or ‘Becoming Dutch’ mean in the 21st Century?”, “Who are ‘the Dutch’ anyway?” and “How do we want to be seen by ourselves and others?”, the artists felt they could only respond to by becoming outsiders. Having researched Stephen Willats work Inside the Space We’ve Been Given (1979) as part of the Van Abbemuseum archives, Nabuurs and Van Doorn wanted to use this occasion to pay tribute to his work. The artists curated a local network of civil workers to re-experience what the artists believe to be the failure of community art, evident from the lack of change in Eindhoven since Willat’s was making his work in the 1970s.

In Multitude Stop (2008), Nabuurs&VanDoorn installed a series of non-operational bus stops at three different locations across Eindhoven. The display boards on each stop each exhibited hand drawn posters advertising the Be(com)ing Dutch Exhibition at Van Abbemuseum, and a hand drawn timetable which, instead of bus routes, presented terms from the Becoming Dutch Dictionary such as ‘culture’ or ‘participation’.

The work enters into dialogue with the work of the UK conceptual artist Stephen Willats by being placed at locations where Willats produced one of his early community art projects, Inside the Space We’ve Been Given (1979). The drawings themselves also directly reference this work stylistically. Inside the Space We’ve Been Given draws on the power of low level decision making from institutions such as municipal authorities. Not only can their decision making process alter the lives of so many, but also physically alter the urban environment. Multitude Stop uses Willats’s concept of psychotic objects, in which he places objects in public space normally read to have a specific function but rendered non-operational. Through the displacement and rendering of everyday objects in public space non-operational, the bus stops installed as part of Multitude Stop are intended to quietly intervene in the urban landscape, subtly disrupt day-to-day lives, provoke short discussions between passers-by, bring art to new audiences, and create space to imagine the world otherwise.