Nabuurs&VanDoorn's installation FREELAND at Van Abbemuseum became the mother ship from where they time traveled to the future of the past together with the Art & Tech department of Technical University Eindhoven. Like cultural pirates they launched smaller attack groups into public space and used their voices as weapon to alarm the status quo.
FREELAND is a poetic and fragmented telling of interwoven histories around Eindhoven’s match and timber factory Picus which incorporates “The Saramacca Project”. A 1946 plan by the Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonization for tens of thousands displaced Jewish people in post-WW2 Central and Eastern Europe. Their idea was to migrate them to Suriname but after two years of negotiations on the resettlement between Dutch and Surinamese governments, the former decided that the plan could not go ahead. The Picus factory designed prefab housing for this large migration project.
Art & Tech is a community of design and engineering students from different backgrounds and different educational institutions. They share the ambition to become the creative engineers of the future by bridging the gap between art and technology.
Nabuurs&VanDoorn laid out a trail for the students to follow and implement interventions.
Nabuurs&VanDoorn’s approach to time and to art is that they see time as full of gaps and art as capable of falling or crossing in and out of what is missing. The site where Picus once operated today is a gentrified creative zone with no traces of what did not happen. The memory of un-heritage (heritage that is not officially considered heritage) is a universal problem and by addressing it the artists bridge cultural differences, create new forms of solidarity, and deconstruct segregation. They believe it is important to keep working through the past, so that missed first experiences can be re-encountered.
History is made in the present and there is no such thing as a neutral witness. It is a space of confrontation. Space is not just volumetric illusion through the construction of perspective. The image is not only time, movement, space, it is choreography. It is like dancing around something, to go around in circles. The economy of desire that emerges, deconstructs the idea of progress and determinism (Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains, Abingdon, UK: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2011).
The trial is a choreography on the stage of un-heritage during which the students read aloud fragments from the paint-ups in the installation FREELAND. The voice is an exploration between body and language. The ethics of the voice is an exploration of the voice as between self and Other. The politics of the voice places it simultaneously between phonos and logos and between zoe and bios.
“Art can give a face to what is hidden in plain sight and bridge cultural differences. We copy and collect archival documents that we work through and recycle—a process expressing polarization that is overcome through artistic intervention. Working in public space makes and imagines movement: displacement, rerouting, translation, flows of indecipherable information, projections of exotic fantasies, the inescapable realities of locations, unwelcome situations, and the stupidity of adventure. Public space is between topics, a continuous dialogue between different cultures, public and private, visibly present and hidden from view, and so on” (Nabuurs&VanDoorn in GREYZONES, Kunstverein Milano Publishing, 2023).
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