On their hard drives Nabuurs&VanDoorn store archives of online communication, conversations, and email dialogues; the artists use censorship to recycle these collections, and with formal gestures paint over most of the information.
A search to abstract the neglected history of an eco-cathedral built by Louis Le Roy and architecture students in the seventies. The original potential was never realized because the board could not appreciate a garden in which local flora and fauna reproduced in, on and around debris and even had it removed because they found the debris too ordinary and ugly.
Looking back, the garden was a revolutionary progressive idea that could have encouraged several generations to think and act in different ways. The built environment is not only infrastructure, but also influences how our minds function and connects different possibilities before we create new realities. The artists position their artwork in this gap and create a feedback loop. This way creating images in which we can experience unbuilt roads.
During multiple conversations on-site with professionals and students the artists discover nothing has changed and old ways prove to be hard to leave behind. In the more recent past the board stopped the construction of archives because in technology there can only be future. Even more recent they want to abolish the art committee in charge of conserving and curating public artworks that somehow survived. Who decides how minds get constructed?
During on-site interventions, Nabuurs&VanDoorn project pixelated communication directly onto the skin of architecture, passersby, or game players. Their work becomes tangible through a resistance against the status quo. Grey zones remain hidden in plain sight until the artists perform the minimal intervention, and grey pixelated borders gain prismatic color through technical failures. The artists bring color to a black and white world.
Nabuurs&VanDoorn are interested in that conceptual projection, which stems from the exploration of the technical and physical characteristics of the photographic medium and of the psychological games within the photograph. Nabuurs&VanDoorn stage failure to confront a desire for neutrality or quasi-invisibility: They are here but as ghosts.
Supported by Cultuur Eindhoven
Comments