‘Warehouse of Machinery’ (detail), Kris Verdonck, EXHIBITION #1
‘55’, Laurent Grasso, Architecture of Fear
Campaign image, Alter Nature: We Can
‘DANCER’, Kris Verdonck, EXHIBITION #1
‘Units of Infinity’ (outside view), Els Vanden Meersch, Architecture of Fear
‘Growth Pattern’ (detail), Allison Kudla, Alter Nature: We Can
‘EXOTE’ (detail), Kris Verdonck, EXHIBITION #1
‘The Silent Movie’, Laurent Grasso, Architecture of Fear
‘PELLET’, Kris Verdonck, EXHIBITION #1
‘Growth Pattern’ (detail), Allison Kudla, Alter Nature: We Can
‘EXOTE’ (detail), Kris Verdonck, EXHIBITION #1
‘EXOTE’ (detail), Kris Verdonck, EXHIBITION #1
‘A Reasonable Man In A Box’, Jill Magid, Architecture of Fear
‘The Villages’, Charlotte Lybeer, Architecture of Fear
‘Synthetic Immune System’, Tuur Van Balen, Alter Nature: The Unnatural Animal
‘Common Flowers – Flower Commons’, BCL, Alter Nature: We Can
‘Warehouse of Machinery’ (detail), Kris Verdonck, EXHIBITION #1
‘Shiki 1’ (detail), Makoto Azuma, Alter Nature: We Can
‘MASS’, Kris Verdonck, EXHIBITION #1
‘Shiki 1’ (detail), Makoto Azuma, Alter Nature: We Can
‘GOSSIP’, Kris Verdonck, EXHIBITION #1
‘NET’, Numen / For Use
‘FRIEZE’ (detail), Kris Verdonck, EXHIBITION #1
‘EXOTE’, Kris Verdonck, EXHIBITION #1
‘Secret Garden’, Hans Op De Beeck, Alter Nature: We Can
‘Global Anxiety Monitor’, De Geuzen, Architecture of Fear
‘Synthetic Immune System’ (detail), Tuur Van Balen, Alter Nature: The Unnatural Animal
‘The Second Seal’, Kin-Wah Tsang, Architecture of Fear
‘Light Membrane’ (detail), Numen / For Use
‘EXOTE’ (detail), Kris Verdonck, EXHIBITION #1
‘Warehouse of Machinery’ (detail), Kris Verdonck, EXHIBITION #1
‘Mobile Wilderness Unit – Wolf’, Mark Dion, Alter Nature: We Can
‘Warehouse of Machinery’ (detail), Kris Verdonck, EXHIBITION #1
‘EXOTE’ (construction), Kris Verdonck, EXHIBITION #1
‘It is all a show. A slow, alienating and effervescent theatre, played in these spaces. A theatre that forges ahead, brass-band style, straight through the bellies. And in those bellies, heads and walls, it leaves its traces. Lightly pulsating, chromatically ragged and ground, laden and obstinate. Sprawled, like a performance of months that seeks out the partitions in an attempt to perforate them. Again and again. Then, it all becomes one. The bellies, heads and walls, like one grandly orchestrated emanating open end. It is all a show. But what a show.’
Kristof Vrancken (°1982 Hasselt, Belgium) studied Photography at the Media and Design Academy in Genk, where he took up the position of Lecturer in Photography in 2008. His other occupations include freelance and art photography. He has been doing the Z33 exhibition photography since 2005.
logbook kristof vrancken
logbook r ĂŠ gine debatt y
I’ve been frequenting Z33 – house for contemporary art for five years now. My relationship with the art space started on a very cautious and guarded foot. Back in 2007, I was informed that Jurgen Bey, Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby and Martí Guixé were having a joint exhibition, Designing Critical Design, in Hasselt. I had a look at Z33’s website and I’m ashamed to say I had trouble reconciling their unusual mix of art, design, architecture, and critical stance with the prissy allure of the Limburg city as I remembered it. After a few visits to Z33, however, I relented. This was the place to go if I wanted to see exhibitions that embraced some of today’s most thought-provoking topics and didn’t put strict borders to creative disciplines. So once every few months, when I’m back in the tiny Walloon village where my family lives, I take one bus to Verviers Gare Centrale, then a first train to Liège-Guillemins where I loiter for 30 minutes in the icy/windy/humid or hot as hell depending on the season waiting space of Santiago Calatrava’s ‘glorious’ station and finally, I take a second train (probably the slowest the National Rail has in stock) to Hasselt. I try not to think about the way back home. Z33’s proposal to work on their catalogue both surprised and flattered me. They were in the middle of a remarkably strong program that included exhibitions dedicated to the lingering fear that has taken hold of society, the manipulation of nature and a solo show dedicated to theatre director Kris Verdonck. I was assured that writing the catalogue would be easy peasy, I would just have to keep on doing my daily blogger’s job: interviewing artists, designers and thinkers, writing up reports of exhibitions, meeting a couple of interesting people. Nothing too taxing, nothing out of the ordinary for me and Z33 would do the rest. And hell, they did! Tim Toubac relentlessly slashed through my texts and checked that what remained made sense, Niek Kosten crafted an efficient design… and then there’s photographer Kristof Vrancken. He has a witty, sympathetic eye that not only documents the openings and installations, but also understands the space, the works, the artists. That may sound trivial, but in my experience, photographers with that level of sensitivity aren’t exactly aplenty in the contemporary art landscape.
Régine Debatty is a blogger, curator and critic based in London and Turin. She writes about the intersection between art, science and social issues on her blog we-make-money-not-art.com. She also contributes to several European design and art magazines and lectures internationally about the way artists, hackers and designers use science as a critical medium for discussion. Co-author of the ‘sprint book’ New Art/Science Affinities Published by: Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University + CMU STUDIO for Creative Inquiry.
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Opening Alter Nature: We Can / Alter Nature: The Future that Never Was
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The Flying Tree On Saturday I made yet another trip to the Z33 centre in Hasselt, this time to see Alter Nature, a project with 4 exhibitions on 3 different locations, “on how we can and do change nature, and how this changes our view of the world.“
while I’m slaving on a lengthy report. Raketenbaum is a performance and a diptych showing how Michael Sailstorfer had a fruit tree catapulted into the air by compressedair cylinders attached to its root balls. By displacing nature quite literally, Raketenbaum offers a playful introduction to an exhibition which focuses on the different ways people have displaced, manipulated or designed nature.
Alter Nature: We Can, the first one, is an exhibition as fascinating as it is cruel to trees. Here’s a quick and lazy peek at the show,
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Carrots Today I finally found some time to write an extensive report on Alter Nature: We Can on my blog.
Commission abolished its ridiculous ban on ‘imperfect’ fruit and vegetables. Morphotheque also refers to the fact that the now almost ubiquitous orange colour of carrots was a political choice. The Netherlands made it particularly popular in the 17th century as an emblem of the House of Orange and the struggle for Dutch independence. White, yellow, red, and purple carrots have long existed but they are now raised primarily as novelty crops.
A striking and simple introduction to the exhibition could be Driessens & Verstappen’s Morphotheque. Dozens of artificial carrots of the most unusual shape are on display, based on genuine, natural carrots that were (are) rejected in distribution centres for not presenting the ‘proper’ size and shape of a carrot. The work reminds us that it was only a year and a half ago that European
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Cooking with Tuur! Lecture Koert van Mensvoort (Next Nature) and Cooking Session Tuur Van Balen. “In his new project Cook Me, Tuur mixes biotechnological and culinary experiments to cook for and with his body. The session gives a taste of what will be on view from January 28th, 2011 on in Alter Nature: The Unnatural Animal.�
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The House of Orange was not only a point of inspiration for Driessens and Verstappen (see earlier), it was also at the heart of the Transgenic Orange Pheasant project. Adam Zaretsky wrote to His Royal Highness Prince Willem-Alexander to propose the creation of a “Royal Dutch Transgenic Breeding Facility”, where orange pheasants would be bred and offered for the royal hunt. The exhibition features images of transgenic pheasants, an impressive genegun, the letter to Prince Willem-Alexander and two videos detailing the project. The manipulation of the colour of carrots doesn’t raise eyebrows but the creation of a pheasant of the same hue triggers more doubts and questions: how far can one go in the creation of a ‘royal aesthetic’?
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Adams Letter to His Royal Highness Prince Willem-Alexander
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It’s My Island One of the artists whose work I was most happy to discover a few days ago at the exhibition Alter Nature: We Can is Antti Laitinen’s.
The idyllic landscape took 3 months to shape up. Large storms reduced it to nothing in next to no time. A year after, Laitinen embarked on Voyage. He constructed yet another paradise island complete with a little palm tree and a white beach, except that this one was not anchored anywhere. What is more, with his paradise island he crossed the Baltic Sea, and he rowed in Greece and on the Thames in London.
The young Finish talent fills a whole room with a video triptych and a series of photos from It’s My Island. The work documents Laitinen’s Sisyphean attempt to build his own island (and therefore micro-nation) in the Baltic Sea. He is seen filling hundreds of bags with sand, dragging them to the sea amidst relentless waves and (weather) conditions, until the island starts to emerge above the water surface.
Laitinen, I thought, was perfect material for a short interview:
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Photo – Antii Laitinen
A ntii L aitinen
It’s My Island documents your quest to build a paradise island in the Baltic Sea. Did you take some time to enjoy your own little territory between the moment it was built and the day it was destroyed by a storm? Or was the 3 month long construction process what mattered most to you? Were other people interested in visiting your island?
Voyage is quite different. You are still building an island but this time it’s a travelling one. Are you exploring nomadism rather than territoriality with this series of performances?
Voyage is a little bit of both. It is a fantasy in that you have your own island but you are free to go wherever you like.
I was also interested in the fact that you chose to use bark to build some of your vessels. Is there any reason for that?
Photo – Antii Laitinen
We have lots of pine trees in Finland. Almost every Finnish person builds a small bark boat when they are young. They take a piece of bark and carve it into the shape of a small sailing boat. I wanted to make a larger bark boat which I could really use. When it was ready I sailed with that across the Baltic sea.
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The whole project took 3 months. Half of the time I was building it and the other half I was taking photos of the island. During this second stretch I also had to repair the island every time a storm destroyed it. It was quite a small island so after it was ready I wasn’t there very often, but lots of ducks often came to rest on the island. When the island was ready I invited some of my friends to visit it. It was kind of the opening of my island. There were about 15 of us at the same time.
A ntii L aitinen
Micronations such as the Principality of Sealand struggle to be officially recognized, this sometimes leads to diplomatic clashes with surrounding nations. Is that something you experienced while sailing on the Thames, the Mersey River or anywhere else? I read in particular that you were almost arrested by the London police? Can you explain what happened and whether you had similar experiences anywhere else?
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Photo – Antii Laitinen
I was rowing my palm island down the Thames with the aim of rowing through the centre of London when, after a few kilometres, the police pulled me over in front of MI5 and stopped my performance. They asked me if I knew what building I was beside and I said “yes, that’s along where I am going”. They didn’t agree, and towed my island and me back up river. One year later, the police stopped my performance in Athens when I was building an island using small stones. Because we didn’t speak the same language, I couldn’t understand what the problem was. Anyhow, the police went away after a while and I was able to continue my project.
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Photo – Antii Laitinen
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Opening Alter Nature: The Unnatural Animal
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Nature Now Nature is under threat. Nature is disappearing. Nature is designed, reinvented and redefined. Nature has become a brand… One thing is sure, nature is not what it used to be. But has nature ever been Nature? Pure, unadulterated and authentic? Since man is man he has attempted to change nature, taming, growing and bending it to his own needs. Nowadays, the manipulation of nature is taking some unprecedented, at times almost chimerical, proportions. Genetic manipulation, geo-engineering and synthetic biology are about to revolutionalise the world as we know it. Engineers envision a forest of 100 000 “artificial trees” that could be deployed within 10 to 20 years to help soak up the world’s carbon emissions1. Elsewhere, scientists are working on in vitro hamburgers2 that won’t require the rearing and slaughtering of livestock3. In about 20 years’ time our good old pharmacies could be replaced by stem cell banks. You’ll get a diagnosis and, instead of medicines, you’ll receive stem cells that will sniff out the dam-
age and dispense tissue therapy4. But almost every single scientific achievement comes with its own list of ethical concerns. While some 70 years ago, British spies were planning to smuggle doses of oestrogen into Hitler’s food to make him more feminine and less aggressive5, the Führer’s medics were busy crafting a master race fit for the Third Reich.6 So one has to wonder whether that lab-grown burger is more than just costly frankenfood? Will we still be the same humans when computer circuits will be routinely stamped onto our skin?7 Should we applaud when a fertility doctor claims to have cloned embryo using tissue from dead people?8 Nature, it seems, has just got even more complicated...
1 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8223528.stm 2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_vitro_meat 3 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45257771/ns/technology_and_sciencescience/t/first-lab-grown-burger-coming-right-thatll-be/ 4 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/scientist-predicts-stemcell-pharmacies-2024663.html 5 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/world-war-2/8701034/ Revealed-sex-hormone-plan-to-feminise-Hitler.html 6 http://natgeotv.com.au/tv/twinMystery/ 7 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/how-computers-willsoon-get-under-our-skin-2336246.html 8 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/3614256.stm
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Photo – Cat Fancy Club - A Somewhere project by Karen Guthrie and Nina Pope (Production still)
Nina Pope and Karen Guthrie on Cat Fancy Club http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2011/02/cat-fancy-club.php
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Movie: Somewhere
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Symposium Alter Nature: Designing Nature / Designing Human Life / Owning Life With: Prof. Dr. Robert Zwijnenberg, Ignace Schops, Prof. Dr. Ann Cuypers, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Adam Zaretsky, Huib de Vriend, Prof. Dr. Catherine Verfaillie, Koen Vanmechelen, Dr. Ir. Rinie van Est, Prof. Dr. Frank Luyten, J.Paul Neeley, Dr. Philippe Jacobs, Dr. Berthold Rutz, Wauthier Robyns, Dr. Peter Raeymaekers
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Lecture Tuur Van Balen & Revital Cohen
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Photo – Régine Debatty
If you want to see a penguin, you go to the zoo. If you’re curious about dinosaurs and dodos, any natural history museum will enlighten you. But where do you go if you want to learn about spider silk-producing goats, anti-malarial mosquitoes, fluorescent zebrafish or the terminator gene?
Right now, you can only rely on good old internet. But in June, the Center for PostNatural History will finally open its doors to anyone interested in genetically engineered life forms. This public outreach organization is dedicated to collecting, documenting and exhibiting life forms that have been inten-
tionally altered by people through processes such as selective breeding and genetic engineering. The center maintains a collection of living species whenever it’s possible. Otherwise they welcome the dead bodies of organisms of postnatural origin and in the absence of postnatural corpses, they present video and photographical material. Along with its permanent exhibition and research facility for PostNatural studies, the center organizes travelling exhibitions that address the PostNatural from thematic and regional perspectives. While I was in Pittsburgh, I paid a visit to Rich Pell, director of the The Center for PostNatural History. The center hadn’t opened yet when we visited Pell. Most of the images below were taken in the temporary studio where the collection was stored until the grand opening.
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Interview with Richard Pell, Director of the Center for PostNatural History
richard pell
Hi, Rich! The Center for PostNatural History (CPNH) looks pretty unique to me but do you know if there is a center, organization or group / initiative doing something similar anywhere else in the world?
It’s easy to understand why one can be fascinated by these modified organisms but what made you decide to open a Center for PostNatural History? It’s a huge commitment.
Around seven years ago I was introduced to the emerging field of synthetic biology by Chris Voigt. At the same time, I was researching evolutionary biology and was struck by the fact that there is such a huge number of
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Photo – Régine Debatty
We wouldn’t want to stake our merit on claims of being first. There are in fact several natural history museums that have mounted exhibits that address issues of postnatural interest, such as the origins of domesticated Horses exhibit produced by the American Natural History Museum in NYC, or domesticated crops, such as the Seeds of Change exhibit at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, or the transgenic bull Herman, who is on display at the Naturalis in the Netherlands. However, these are the exceptions to the rule. None of these museums are actively collecting, or interested in collecting, domesticated or otherwise genetically modified organisms. The evolutionary history that begins with the dawn of agriculture and the domestication of animals and continues on towards genetic engineering and synthetic biology is documented in bits and pieces, but not in any central location. To our knowledge there are no other museums that take as their mission to collect and exhibit the life forms that have been intentionally altered by humans.
richard pell
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Photo – Régine Debatty
We take it as our mission to allow for people to have the experience of arriving at an idea on their own. Personal discovery can be an incredibly transformative experience. Language that comes with a predefined worldview can get in the way of a person finding their own language and framework of understanding. As a strategy we make an attempt to describe the postnatural world without using the language of industry, academia or activism. In practice, this is not always possible,
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When you start reading about the Roundup ready corn, the Triploidy Atlantic Salmon or other modified plants or insects, it is hard not to be judgmental. Some of the modifications are quite positive of course, such as the mosquito that doesn’t transmit malaria. Still, I haven’t detected criticism in your discourse so far. So what is your position/strategy? Do you plan to be as neutral as possible in your presentation of the information and let the public join the dots?
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resources devoted to documenting the natural world, but that the participation of humans in altering that living world is so rarely presented to the public. When I began looking at the collections of natural history museums I noticed that newly engineered organisms were not only absent from the collections, but that there was little interest in collecting them. The rare exceptions of Herman the Bull in the Netherlands, or Dolly the Sheep in Scotland, both point to the symbolic roll that these organisms can often play as icons, while the vast multitude of genetically engineered organisms remain undocumented. This seems like a significant blind spot in the public consciousness worth addressing.
richard pell
but it remains the ideal goal. Forming one’s own opinion can be a frustrating experience. We are sometimes contacted by people, months after coming across one of our exhibits, who are still wrestling with an issue. For us, this is encouraging. The issues are too important and too complicated not to be questioning our own assumptions and re-framing our own ideas in new ways.
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I missed Alter Nature: Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger in the non-commercial gallery for contemporary art CIAP, where the focus was on the human mutating body. Many of the artists and designers whose work I admire were showing some of their recent works there: Art Orienté Objet, Michael Burton, Revital Cohen, Paddy Hartley, etc. But since I had already interviewed them in the past on my blog, I thought I’d try and catch up with the artists I didn’t know by asking them a few questions about the pieces they were showing in Hasselt. Gair Dunlop was an obvious choice because of his critical and historical (verging on the retro-futuristic) approach on scientific research. The work of Marcia Nolte appealed to me, photography
lover that I am. I must confess that I was equally repelled by her view of our future (and not entirely irrealistic) body. Finally I interviewed Charlotte Jarvis after I had seen a dramatic performance of the SOBA babies at the graduation show at the Royal College of Art in London back in June. And I also missed Alter Nature: The Future That Never Was at the Fashion Museum Hasselt. Under this puzzling title, the exhibition was exploring the way scientific innovation is steering the work of fashion designers (and sometimes vice versa.) I only interviewed one artist in this show. I chose Suzanne Lee because her work hovers between pure fashion design and industrial research. But also because I thought that, as the author of the book Fashioning the Future: Tomorrow’s Wardrobe, she would be able to bring the theme of the exhibition into a broader context better than anyone else I knew.
h a s s e lt
For some reason, I missed two exhibitions that accompanied Z33’s Alter Nature show. And I’m still banging my head on the kitchen table because of this negligence.
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Damn it! How did i manage to miss not just one but two Alter Nature shows?
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Twentieth Century Calling A wooden desk, a Rolodex card file, an upbeat promotional film from 1962... Retro artefacts that document, comment and fictionalize one of the chapters that led to the discovery of DNA: Maurice Wilkins’s pioneering of x-ray techniques, which made it possible to see and decipher the DNA structure. But beyond the groundbreaking episode in the history of genetics, Gair Dunlop’s installation Century 21 Calling explores the social context of the discovery of DNA and evokes the promise of a glorious future of scientific discoveries like this. Dunlop is a photographer, video maker and “interactive tinkerer” who is also a Course Director in Time Based Art & Digital Film at Dundee University. He was kind enough to find time between his work in Dundee and some exhibitions abroad to answer my question.
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Photo – Gair Dunlop
gair dunlop
Artists working with science have an interesting freedom, as long as the role is not illustrative. There are often interesting tensions between the more metropolitan medical foundations – such as the Wellcome Trust for example – and the outlying laboratories and facilities which they fund. The latter want something commemorative, illustrative and craft based; the former have space for reflection and critique. John Latham’s idea of the ‘incidental person’ can be useful to keep in mind when entering such sites; the assumption of what you are and what you’re interested in as an artist can give people in research facilities a little bit of mental space to step off the CIAP 25
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Twentieth Century Calling intertwines contemporary events, media stories and fragments about Maurice Wilkins and his work on DNA. He was a fascinating character. Wilkins was a physicist and molecular biologist who gained fame with his work on the structure of DNA. Following his involvement in the Manhattan Project, Wilkins became an opponent of the development of nuclear weapons, and he was involved in the foundation of the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science. Now I was wondering about artists who work with science, either as a theme like you do or as a ‘material’ (artists working in labs and manipulating life for example). What is their “Social Responsibility in Science”? How do you see your role as an artist when you work on themes that involve progress, science, technology? Do you want to reveal? Criticize? Observe? Highlight problematic issues?
gair dunlop
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Photo – Gair Dunlop
usual “this is what we’re about here” spiel and talk more thoughtfully. (Of course many people on research and restricted facilities have had ‘media training’ and are thus harder to reach and sometimes less interesting as a result.) Speaking personally, my work over the last 10 years has retraced deep personal concerns and commitments over the course of my life. I grew up in a new town (Cumbernauld) where a sense that we were living in a new future persisted, despite the late seventies slump. Unemployment was increasing, and the future didn’t seem to have any solutions. New biologies, Military airfields, Automation, nuclear disaster; all these things seemed very real and I spent many years as a rather nihilist activist in antinuclear squatting circles. I am now highly interested in questions of who the people on the other side of the fences were, what they believed, and how they lived and worked. To find out about all this doesn’t mean that I have come to share their beliefs; I am now able to be genuinely curious rather than combative.
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By protecting us from the brutality of the environment, medical and technological developments have spared us much of the trouble of natural selection. According to Professor Steve Jones, geneticist at University College London, the process described by Charles Darwin in his 1859 essay On the Origin of Species is still at work. He believes that “Natural selection, if it hasn’t stopped, has at least slowed down.” Other researchers go further and claim that
human evolution is increasingly likely to be driven as much by the way we are able to modify the world as by nature. Marcia Nolte’s disquieting photos seem to illustrate this theory. Her portrait series Corpus 2.0 shows a human body that has adjusted itself to some of the most widelyadopted products, technological gadgets and fashion trends. The photos are aesthetically seductive but the scenario they triggered in my mind made me feel a bit queasy.
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Interview with Marcia Nolte
marcia nolte
Hi Marcia! Some of the portraits you created are somewhat disturbing. Do they reflect a view you might have on technology, fashion and more generally the times we are living in? Are you optimistic or do your photos aim to reflect the darker sides of technology and fashion?
The portraits are a reflection on what I see technology, fashion and daily behaviours do to the human body. I don’t want to shock people with my portraits, but I do think it is important to make them aware of how these factors, like technology and fashion, influence human behaviour these days. I think the body and technology will meet more and more in the future, that we cannot close our eyes for the changes of the human body. I think it is important that the design industry itself, aside from their own developments, sees a direction which is reacting to these developments. They can take the benefits from it to search for even better solutions. Technology should learn from the human body and the other way around. Both worlds need to know that they have an important relationship here, which can’t be turned back. I think my portraits reflect my curiosity about the developments in technology and fashion. And in my opinion curiosity is an optimistic noun in this subject.
Parallel to the advances in technology, we also witness a high emphasis on appearance, beauty seems to be delineated according to stricter and sometimes narrow standards. Youth, a certain shape of the body, colour of skin, length of legs, etc. Have you thought about how the adaptation of the body to
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technology could coexist with the strict canons of beauty? Would our idea of beauty evolve? Like pneumatic artificial breasts or lips, no matter how obvious they are, nowadays don’t seem so shocking anymore, but rather are regarded as desirable.
Corpus 2.0 ‘Head-phone ear’, 2008 as featured in De Standaard (December 8, 2010)
My portraits are a hypothetic image which triggers you to come up with a diversity of questions and possible answers for it. I think it is possible that these new forms of the body, which are usually associated with abnormality, can be associated with bravery, goodness, super heroes, and can considered beautiful again.
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If we talk about evolution, we talk about the survival of the fittest. Historically speaking, the diminution of body hair in humans might have been an awkward sight, but perhaps also a sign of positive development. So if you see a person with a ‘Touch-it thumb’ who has an extra thumb-bone, you must think: ‘wow, this person is a super-text-messenger, he has got this extra flexibility; what else could this extra thumb-bone be handy for and what could be the benefits for me’. Of course, it will take time to accept this evolutionary deformation, but beauty ideals also change due to evolution.
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Biocouture a visit to Suzanne Lee’s studio A couple of weeks ago I paid a visit to Suzanne Lee in her studio, a few steps away from Tate Modern. I thought she was the best person to approach if I wanted an informed and witty comment on the show Alter Nature: The Future that Never Was at the Fashion Museum in Hasselt.
The project is entirely driven by an ecological ambition: can we remove the waste stream from clothing production? Can we manufacture something new from the waste? Biocouture proves that it can be done since cellulose is a waste product of the bacteria’s digestion of sugar. Moreover, Biocouture considerably reduces the various processes necessary to make a piece
Surprisingly, the fashion design industry isn’t keen on investing money into the development of the material. Prestigious fashion houses regularly contact Lee to get her to work with them but what they want is a ready to cut and use material. Unlike other design fields, fashion design doesn’t seem to be much concerned with the whole research and development process. Biocouture, however, is a long term research project, it doesn’t fit into the time-scale of fashion shows. The material is seductive, sensual and ecological but many issues remain to be resolved, the material is not stable, it biodegrades and it changes with humidity. Wear a Biocouture dress in the rain and it will absorb up to 98% of its weight. It will get too heavy to wear comfortably and the seams will fall apart. Suzanne is now looking for a way to devise a more waterrepellent culture to grow the bacteria in. At the moment, the technology isn’t ready to be mass produced either. Pattern cutters, for example, haven’t been trained to deal with this type of material.
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Photo – Régine Debatty
Suzanne is a fashion designer, the author of a book about the future of fashion, a former Senior Research Fellow in Fashion and Textiles at Central Saint Martins and she is now pursuing her research on Biocouture, a method for growing textile from a bacterial/ green tea solution. I entered her working space thinking we’d speak technology, future and frocks but the conversation turned into the human, ecological and ethical cost of the fashion industry.
of fabric. Nowadays, all the stages of the production of a garment are separated. With Biocouture they would become only one.
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Forgive Us Our Charlotte Jarvis’s Forgive Us Our tells the poignant tale of the SOBA babies. Some 20 years ago, a test group of children that have now become known as the SOBA babies were genetically modified as part of a programme to eradicate greed, lust and anger. The ultimate goal of this scientific experiment was to erase social disorder and civil disobedience from Great Britain. The SOBA babies have now reached adulthood and they are still struggling to come to terms with their condition. Researchers in synthetic biology have modified their bodies so that they get rashes,
bruising and violent nose bleeds at the first sign of greed. Any feeling of lust or mere arousal is punished by fainting and engorged genitals. An angry SOBA baby won’t be able to shout as any attempt to raise their voice only produces a pitifully high and squeaky sound. SOBA (Science Of Behavioural Alteration) is obviously a fictional scientific experiment but Jarvis has made it almost tangible in a series of texts, films, photos, performances and a book that invite us to fully engage with an often satirical scenario and to reassess our position within the current mediascience climate.
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charlotte jarvis
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Hello Charlotte! The SOBA experiments at the core of your scenario aimed at eradicating greed, lust and anger. What strikes me about the project is that it could almost be a science-fiction story. It has a fascinating narrative, it stretches the credibility of science enough to still be believable but it’s a design project. Can you tell us what makes Forgive Us Our a design or art project rather than science-fiction?
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For me, there is no meaningful distinction to be made between art, design, science fiction or any other genre. I’m happy for my work to be termed either or, optimally, both. I have always made work that exists between the boundaries of genres. I think I find myself in areas that are not clearly defined because I believe that it is in these areas that you can gain some real critical perspective on both what you are making and upon the subject you are attempting to dissect. I think that work that is less easy to define has an advantage in that it cannot be so easily consumed without thinking – it takes a bit of chewing over in order to know how to approach it. Of course, it could subsequently be seen as pretentious or intimidating. I try to counter this by making my work more immediately gratifying in other ways – use of humour for example. During my BA I read a lot of feminist theory, and I came across Teresa de Lauretis. I would like my work to fulfil her description of an “effort to create new spaces of discourse, to rewrite cultural narratives, and to define the terms of another perspective – a view from ‘elsewhere’.”
charlotte jarvis
Why did you choose to approach the project through newspaper clippings? Why this emphasis on the way media filters science achievements?
We don’t get information about scientific achievements from scientists; we get it from newspapers, the internet and TV. I have always been interested in the mechanism by which the media mediates that information. Much of my work aims to make that process explicit and to use satire and mimicry to critique the results. It also comes back to the theme of veracity. I wanted to make a project in which science fact and science fiction were interchangeable and indistinguishable from each other – that is a state that I would argue already exists within a large proportion of the tabloid press, so the context seemed an appropriate fit. Lastly, I use humour a lot in my work. I think it can be an incredibly effective tool, especially when dealing with complex or theoretical subject matter. The hyperbole intrinsic to the media voice – be it The Sun or New Scientist – gives an awful lot of scope for making a narrative comic.
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Tuur Van Balen and Revital Cohen are having a double exhibition show at Z33. Presenting both finished and ‘in progress’ research projects, the exhibition entitled The Unnatural Animal explores progress in bioscience and biotechnology but also their impact on our norms and values. Hopefully I’ll manage to catch up with them before the Z33 show closes.
Photo – Tuur Van Balen
In the meantime, this post is going to focus on Tuur Van Balen’s most recent work, Cook Me – Black Bile, which saw him cook with his own blood with the help of leeches. Have a look at the video and see if you can stomach more details about the project: http://www.vimeo.com/19400225
Cook Me – Black Bile proposes to make synthetic biology and the new interactions it can trigger within our body part and parcel of a recipe to control the feeling of melancholy. As Tuur explained to me, “by ‘programming’ the DNA of the yeast used in the recipe, the yeast becomes a biosensor. So when it is used to marinade the leech, it can measure a variety of hormones and chemicals in your blood that relate to your mood. On top of that, the yeast can be programmed to also bio-synthesize serotonergic agents (chemicals that alter the levels of serotonine) according to what it senses.” The advantage this bespoke yeast has over the serotonin altering pills prescribed by doctors is that the latter offer a similar amount and composition of chemicals for every individual. Synthetic biology, on the other hand, allows to tailor this (emotional) experience for a specific person at a specific time. Now back to the recipe. An instrument specially designed by Tuur allows the leech to feed on the forearm and is then used to cook a blood mousse. The parasite’s body reacts with the marinade and the laughing gas to make the blood mousse. The blood mousse is served with oyster mushrooms, a redcurrant sauce and blood sorrel.
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Cook Me – Black Bile
The recipe is inspired by Hippocrates’ Four Humours theory that sees the body as an entity comprised of four basic substances: yellow bile, blood, phlegm and black bile. This theory inspired bloodletting, a medical practice aimed at restoring both physical and mental health by bringing these bodily fluids back into balance. Each substance is
linked to a specific temperament, black bile (gr. melan chole), the fictional of these four fluids, evokes the humour of melancholy. Cook Me – Black Bile thus examines the space between ancient beliefs and future unknowns, between nonsense and science, the kitchen and the pharmacy.
Photos – Tuur Van Balen
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Photos – Tuur Van Balen
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The serotonin knock-out rat While watching the interview that Jan Boelen, the artistic director at Z33, did with the designer, I became intrigued by one of the projects she briefly discussed. Entitled Ready-to-use Models, this work in progress involves a SERT Knock-out rat, a laboratory tool genetically designed to be constantly depressed. The rats, which can be ordered from online catalogues, are manipulated not to be able to absorb serotonin, the hormone responsible for feelings of contentment and happiness. Revital designed a big play cage that
attempts to bring some happiness to the morose little rodent while questioning the exchange of roles between animal and object. Ready-to-use Models attempts to question the current definitions used to indicate living creatures. Does one denominate a manipulated organism as an object, product, animal or pet? What consequences does this choice of definition entail for our perceptions, feelings and behaviours regarding living creatures? I asked Revital to give us more details about this particular project:
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revital cohen
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I was shocked and intrigued by that poor serotonin Knock-out rat. How did you find out about its existence? I’m sure my question will sound naive but is it legal to engineer a rat so that it will lead an anxious and sad existence?
Your design attempts to create an environment where the rat would be able to get some relief from its anxiety. However, you seem to be aware all along that this generous attempt to make the rat ‘happy’ is doomed to fail. So why did you build this entertainment park for the rat? What did you want to communicate with this project?
I am very interested in the language used in the production and trade of designed animals, which is really the language of commerce and marketing of objects. I wanted to see what might happen if I took this biological product and treated it as though it were an animal. This has led me to the very naive attempt of trying to cheer up the rat, an empathetic sentiment which we
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This installation is the beginning of a large project I am developing around the subject of animal design. I have been researching the existence of ‘living products’ for years, and stumbled upon Genoway while looking into the legalities of transgenic species in Europe. Since these services/products exist it must be legal, but to my understanding within a scientific experimental environment only. I assume the design principle behind the engineering of these rodents was that it is justified to make an animal unhappy if it may lead to the abolishment of unhappiness in humans. I am not sure that I agree with this sentiment, but I find these designed creatures fascinating because they raise all these bioethical questions.
revital cohen
reserve to living beings. The predictable futility of this attempt highlights the essence of this creature as a non-animal, a bio product, and opens up many questions about the nature of these species and how we are meant to perceive and relate to them. To me the installation forms the start of defining a new taxonomy of creatures which blur the boundaries between object and animal.
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At Z33 Revital Cohen also presented a video that shows the exact opposite of the commodification of the rat: a series of products designed to be treated like real pets, from Tamagotchi to Fur Real Friends robots, this is a commercial for the last one: Pets without the Poop. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0chq2crnzug
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Pets without the poop!
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Opening Kris verdonck + performance SHELL
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Opening Numen/For Use – NET
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Kris Verdonck’s warehouse of machinery So far the work of Kris Verdonck has mostly been a privilege reserved to the aficionados of theatre stages but Z33 has invited the theatre-maker and artist to invade its rooms with wonderful machinery, installations, videos and even a metaphorical garden filled with some of the most invasive non-native plant and animal species in Belgium. It’s the artist’s first ‘gallery’ exhibition. Hence the title of the show (EXHIBITION #1). Verdonck’s works are incredibly invigorating because of their originality and poetry but a few moments spent in their company reveals their dark undertone. The work of Kris Verdonck focuses on the confusion of man in an estranged world due to technological development. The tension between man and machine, between living species and dead materials creates an atmosphere of Unheimlichkeit or eeriness. This ‘current state of the world’ – with its environmental problems, ecological disasters and wars – is the central theme through his oeuvre. In the solo exhibition in Z33, Kris Verdonck focuses on the one hand on the confusion and eeriness of man in his environment. On the other hand, his work is about the
confusion of the world itself in which the Apocalypse has already taken place. EXHIBITION #1 is a bold move, the challenge was to prove that Verdonck’s pieces, many of which the artist describes as “big installations that are displayed in a theatrical context”, were strong enough to stand on their own two feet in a contemporary art gallery. I had never experienced any of his works in theatres before so I had no preconceptions or expectations. All I saw were absorbing videos, stunning installations and a genuine robot. The most jaw-dropping moment for me was when I entered a big room on the first floor of Z33 filled with the appliances and objects developed by the artist for live shows. Most of them would normally be kept behind the scenes. The machines often look like medieval (torture) instruments. At the same time, they are often high-technological objects, that fulfil complex functions. They form a large contrast with the extremely aesthetic images that they produce. The overview of machines by Kris Verdonck addresses the field of tension between man and machine in today’s society. What relationship can/must/do people want to enter into with technology? How difficult is the balancing act between human control and submission to machines?
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EXOTE an indoor garden for invasive alien species The European Union defines “Invasive Alien Species” as those that thrive outside their natural distribution area and threaten biological diversity. Theatre maker and visual artist Kris Verdonck selected terrestrial plants, crustraceans, insects, fish, amphibians, birds and other organisms that live in Belgium from the list of IAS. Then he put them all together in one big luminous garden on the first floor of Z33. The result is an artificial jungle of bamboo, parrots, bullfrogs, Japanese knot weeds and little trees carrying blue berries. Before entering, however, you are invited to wear white rubber boots, a pair of gloves, and a lab coat. As if you were about to enter a contaminated space? Or maybe it’s the space that shouldn’t be contaminated by you? After all, man is the one responsible for any ecological damage caused by non native species. We introduced them into the new habitat, intentionally or by accident (when exiting Z33 with seeds that would further invade the local fauna for example). What is sure is that the pristine antechamber in all its whiteness and sanitariness offers a striking contrast to the garden, all messy
and multicolored. No one could have orchestrated the effect better than a theatre maker like Verdonck. Once you’re inside, it’s easy to forget that these are ‘invasive alien species’. Verdonck’s garden opened in May and looked like a little piece of Eden. All lush flowers, green parrots, colourful plants, cheerful amphibians and mysterious moustachioed fish. When I visited the show a week ago, the place was still jaw-dropping but in a rather post-apocalyptic way. It felt a bit desolate. Good care was taken of the fauna and flora but the flowers were perishing, the parakeets had to be taken away because they were wolfing on any flower or fruit they could get their beaks on, tadpoles were vanishing, etc. The sad outcome of the experiment was not planned but it certainly provides us with a lesson. This indoor garden explores alienation, man’s relentless interference with nature. However, as the catalogue of the exhibition states, “EXOTE’s aim is not to position itself within the scientific debate on biological invasions, but to be a metaphor to reflect on our interaction with the environment in which we live”.
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24 rabbits travelled from Europe to Australia in 1859 for the pleasure of a man fond of hunting. Within ten years of their introduction, rabbits had become so prevalent that two million could be shot or trapped annually without having any noticeable effect on the population. European rabbits have no natural predators in Australia and their impact on the ecology is devastating. The hunting prey quickly became nothing more than pest that has to be eradicated by all means. The poor creatures are vilified to the point that the Easter bunny has been replaced by the Easter Bilby.
Originally, the green exotic birds were a phenomenon exclusive to Brussels. The first breeding collar parakeets were spotted as early as 1966, in the park of Tervuren. But the actual start of the Belgian parakeet colony came about in 1974, when Guy Florizoone, the then Director of the Meli Zoo near the Atomium in Brussels, released fifty exotic birds. Brussels, Florizoone thought, “could use some more colour�. Only the collar parakeets were resistant to our cold winters; the other birds did not survive the experiment. By 1984, 250 parakeets were circling the capital city, in 1988 their number had doubled and today, the parakeet population counts more than 7000 birds.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_Bilby http://members.optushome.com.au/bilbies/images/bilbies_not_bunnies.jpg
http://www.nieuwsblad.be/article/detail. aspx?articleid=Q51A3F57
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2 real stories on invasive species
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An interview with Kris Verdonck Kris Verdonck was obviously on my list of artists to contact. That’s until I realized that dramaturge Marianne Van Kerckhoven had already interviewed him for Z33’s mini catalogue of his solo show. That swiftly pulled the rug from under my feet. Especially because she seemed to be curious about the same issues as I was.
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Marianne Van Kerkhoven: Your work is situated in the transit zone between visual arts and theatre. So far, it has mainly been shown in theatres. This is your first major exhibition. Do you expect your images to see a shift in meaning in this new context?
You’re certainly being confronted here with viewers who belong to a different ‘circuit’ than theatre-goers.
I’m very curious about that. You can see my ‘plays’ like I/II/III/IIII or END – and also many of my performances – as big installations that are displayed in a theatrical context. For me they’re installations in every sense. People who are familiar with visual arts have less difficulty with this, while a theatre or dance audience still likes to see an evolution or even a story in the figures. So the ‘visual arts way’ of viewing the
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That’s the great experiment of this exhibition. I hope that not much will change, but we just don’t know. In the theatre, time has a big impact on the work: this usually has to do with a theatrical time that the audience experiences. Whether it’s an object, a video or a play that’s being shown, in a theatre the audience is asked to view it for a clearly delimited time. This dynamic influences their perception of it. A theatre-goer sees things differently than someone who can just decide to leave. In the semi-enclosed, darkened theatre, there’s much more social pressure not to leave, and this too influences the perception. The figures that I create – whether they’re filmed or live – usually do a very limited number of actions or movements. Time and duration has a big impact on them as well. In a visual arts context, the quality of the image may gain in importance. But actually I don’t know for sure.
EXHIBItion #1
kris verdonck
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piece works very well in my theatre projects or performances. I’m also curious as to what this relationship with the audience in a house for contemporary art will be like. For me it’s really about what’s happening inside the viewer at the moment of the experience. For example, when walking around in the EXOTE installation – in this garden full of invasive alien species – you can hardly claim that there’s ‘a classic theatrical tension’ in the air.
It’s not only a ‘total experience’ for the viewer; EXOTE is also pushing the boundaries of art itself.
The entire production process, both before and after the exhibition, is part of the work. Looking for the plants and animals, dealing with safety provisions, protecting staff, viewers and the environment, destroying the plants, cleaning up afterwards… It’s all part of the installation. We have to be aware that the whole environment – not only Z33, but also Hasselt and the surrounding areas – could potentially be impacted by this work. The invasive alien species have to be kept within the walls of the exhibition space. Otherwise, they could damage the environment in a very direct way. In a ‘performance’ it’s always about something ‘real’, something that’s not being played but is actually real. The garden is a real and dangerous ‘object’: a situation that you can’t take lightly; an environment with entities that could cause visitors direct physical injuries. For example, if you touch the giant hogweed you might get burnt.
Making ‘dangerous’ art: is that one of the tasks of an artist today?
We live in a completely infantilised, ‘vaseline-ised’ society, a society in which we’re double-insured for everything, because ‘something’s bound to happen at some point!’ It’s a society
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The full interview can be found on the Z33 website. Marianne van Kerkhoven (1948) was one of the first dramaturges in Dutch speaking theatre. In her early career she made political theatre with The Trojan Horse company. From the mid-80s onwards, she has worked with different choreographers and theatre makers at the Kaaitheater in Brussels. She regularly publishes on theatre and dance.
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that’s cracking under the weight of over-protection, that’s coming to a standstill due to the crippling fear of what might happen. To me, art seems to be a good tool that we can use to enter into a dialogue with this reality, in order to return to a lost sense of reasonableness. Obviously, the scientists we spoke to in preparing EXOTE cannot (or may not?) think in such extremes as artists when it comes to communicating about dangerous, invasive alien species to a wide audience. They would never create such an extreme garden as this in order to set a public debate in motion and touch a raw nerve.
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The importance of being interdisciplinary “Multidisciplinary”, “interdisciplinary”, “cross-disciplinary” and “transdisciplinary” are such fashionable terms nowadays that you’d expect them to be part of the modus operandi of museums and other art venues, instead of just finding them as recurring elements on the application forms filled outby artists looking for a commission. Yet, I sometimes feel that the boundaries between creative disciplines are as high as ever. 8 years ago, when I started blogging with the enthusiasm of the neophyte, I was told time and time again about the dichotomy ruling the contemporary art world. On the one side you have the Contemporary Art world – with a big C and a big A. The art you admire at Tate Modern, that you would like to buy at Frieze, the one that graces the pages of pretty much any art magazine you grab at the newsagent’s or museum. On the other side there is new media art. Definitions of the expression ‘new media art’ may vary, but it is safe to say that it refers to the art that has a predilection for recent developments
in technology and science. New media art is the underdog, it almost never gets invited to Contemporary Art’s parties. You can see it in different venues (the ‘festivals’), read about it in magazines that you might struggle to find at the newsagent’s. 8 years later, these two are still inhabiting two separate islands. So, I go to new media art festivals and then to contemporary art exhibitions. But like many people, I’m also interested in critical design, activism, architecture and graphic design. Which involves even more venues, events and press outlets... You don’t have to be an Ibn Khaldun or a Leonardo da Vinci, Renaissance Man par excellence, to desire to see these fields of creativity converse more regularly under one roof. Z33, however, offers such a forum. The art centre is one of those rare spaces where the work of designers of all affiliations, architects and artists (new media or ‘just contemporary’) enter in a dialogue about a common theme. I can’t think of many art centres managing this in such a seamless way. MU in Eindhoven, Stroom in The Hague, maybe HMKV in Dortmund or CCCS-Strozzina in Florence. To be honest, I can’t think of many more...
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numen/for use
There is only one week left for you to run to Z33 and bounce around the amazing work that Numen / For Use has created especially for the art house. This is the second time this year that I’ve encountered the work of the design collective. I discovered their work in spring when I was attending a press conference at CCCS – Strozzina in Florence. Sven Jonke, Christoph Katzler and Nikola Radeljkovic had wrapped transparent tape all over the courtyard of the venerable Palazzo Strozzi to shape a self-supporting cocoon for people to crawl inside. For Z33, they’ve
left the gaffer tape in Vienna and Zagreb (where they are based) and used nets to turn the whole exhibition space into a giant playground that can be explored horizontally as well as vertically. The idea might look incredibly simple but the result evokes floating architecture and flexible, aerial “landscape” as much as jungle gym. I was beyond happy when Nikola and Christoph accepted to discuss their work with me. The interview focuses mostly on the NET at Z33 and on the TAPE walkin installation I saw in Florence but the Numen/ For Use website will, I’m sure, give you many more reasons to admire their work.
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Interview with Numen / For Use
numen / for use
Sorry if I’m going to start on a very trivial note but one of the first questions that popped into my mind was “how about security?” I’m sure your installations are perfectly safe and sound but is ‘health and safety’ ever an issue? Are there any special safety measures you have to comply with and have they ever got in the way of your creativity?
Security and safety are always the issues we fight. Since we have been educated as applied artists and since we do a lot of set design in theatre we are aware of all the problems concerning statics and security. It is part of every daily reality. Especially when you make something in a public space there are a lot of law issues to deal with. But often they are rather idiotic issues. It is bizarre to see how different countries and different organizers address legal issues differently, how they put weight and importance on totally different things and how they ignore others entirely. But it is also interesting that in art institutions the law is very often not seen so super strict like in other fields. This is one reason why I like to work there. Up to now it was like this that either the ideas were realised without bigger problems or they were stopped very early due to some legal regulations.
How did you get to create NET for Z33? Did they give you carte blanche or did you work on the idea together with the curator?
We said, “we want to try something new.” They said, “okay but we need the idea within two weeks”, which was rather a short period for us to find something we really liked. But the idea actually came easily and fast, which is rather rare, and we were all quite satisfied from the beginning.
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In the video interview that you did for Z33, you explain that NET is a test bed for a public version that could be installed between houses. Have you found a location already? Would you see it as a permanent structure or a nomadic one?
Photo – Numen/For Use
When I saw the TAPE installation in the courtyard of Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, it was morning, there was a press conference, and none of the journalists were climbing inside the structure. Actually, I had no idea anyone was allowed to or even that anyone would think of doing it. The public is usually not supposed to climb into sculptures/ installations. But somehow, I found the work fascinating enough. What is most important to you, that the public will want to engage physically with your work or that it is visually compelling?
For us it is 100% important that the public can go inside and experience these works. Nowadays we write it in our contracts that the public has to be
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Yes, we are searching for a nice public location to realize it there! Contrary to our other walk-in installation (called TAPE) it is much harder to find a location in the public space. Many of my friends would love to have it in their backyard to open the window and to jump inside for a sun-bath or whatever. But I guess it would be difficult to find a location where all neighbours would give permission to have “strangers” hanging around in front of their windows. Another possibility would be to use one of those football-cages where kids play and to implant it there. It would be a different situation, but I think it would still work. It will probably have to be temporary due to the law and safety regulations.
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Photo – Numen/For Use
able to go inside during normal opening hours. When people see the installations most of them are curious, they want to go inside. But since you have to take your shoes off and crawl on all fours it takes down the social barriers. People start to enjoy it together in a very communicative way although they often do not even know each other. This is nice! That’s why we like to see it in public. Maybe it is somehow like in a different world and some rules do not count anymore for a while.
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Photo – Z33
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Tape Workshop Numen/For Use
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opening architecture of fear
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Discussing democracy, torture and secret services with Jill Magid Z33 has just opened an exhibition with a very promising title. Architecture of Fear explores how feelings of fear pervade daily life in the contemporary media society. I’m going to visit it on Thursday but in the meantime I thought I’d ask one of the participating artists, Jill Magid, to tell us about the work she is showing at Z33 and more generally about her experience with impersonal power structures (police, intelligence agencies, security systems, etc.) which, whether they contribute to it or fight it, are part of this ‘architecture of fear.’ One of Magid’s most ironic works is System Azure. In 2003, the artist introduced herself to the Amsterdam Police as a ‘Security Ornamentation Professional’ working for a fictitious company. Magid’s proposal to embellish police cameras was accepted and she was hired to hand-glue rhinestones to security cameras at the Amsterdam Headquarters of Police, a work that had previously been rejected when she first presented it as an art project.
The work Magid is showing at Z33 this fall, A Reasonable Man in a Box, was inspired by the “Bybee Memo”, a 2002 document signed by Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee. The document considered the use of mental and physical torment and stated that acts widely regarded as torture might be legally permissible under an expansive interpretation of Presidential authority during the ‘War on Terror’. The memos were declassified by President Obama in 2009. One of the acceptable methods of ‘enhanced interrogation’ described in the document involved the use of a confinement box. The prisoner would be confined inside this box with harmless insects. The people in charge would know that the insect or the animal is innocuous but would leave the prisoner in the dark about it. Magid’s take on the interrogation technique is a room where the silhouette of a big hissing scorpion is projected on a wall. Every once and a while a pair of tweezers appears on screen to catch the animal by its tail.
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architecture of fear
Hi Jill! I’ve been following and admiring your work ever since I started blogging. So far I have associated you with performative works in which you put yourself on the front line (Lincoln Ocean Victor Eddy, Lobby 7 or Evidence Locker for example.) There’s no visible trace of you in “A Reasonable Man in a Box”. How do you decide whether you are going to be so visibly involved and present in a new work or when you are going to step back?
I saw images and read descriptions of the installation at the Whitney Museum. The room where the film was screened seemed to be spacious, with a visible entrance/ exit. From what I gathered it still made quite an impact on visitors. But why didn’t you choose to take a more extreme road and show the video in a claustrophobic space or in one that looked more like a cell or in a room you couldn’t exit until the end of the video?
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The Spy Project – in which I am the main protagonist, finished just before I began the research that led to A Reasonable Man in a Box. The Spy Project involved the censorship of my novel by the Dutch secret service about my experience working with it. This redacted manuscript got me to thinking about other government-censored documents. Simultaneously, I was researching torture as it is used by democracies, and how these practices are hidden from public view or scrutiny. Both paths led me to the Bybee Memo. As the document was already complete and therefore no longer open to change, I felt I could not enter into it as a protagonist. I found a different way to engage in it.
jill magid
Would it have been too literal? Will the setting of the work at Z33 be similar to the one at the Whitney?
I was not trying to make the viewer the tortured victim inside the box (i.e. gallery); rather, I wanted the viewer to consider the fundamental questions at the heart of the memo: what is reasonable; and what is a reasonable man in a box? The install is creepy, uncomfortable, and simple. The gallery becomes a shadow box: the shadow of the scorpion in the gallery is proportional to ‘the stinging insect’ in a confinement box. The shadow, as projected in both the Whitney and at Z33, is larger than life, as the rooms in which they are installed are of course bigger than a confinement box, which is only the size of a person sitting or standing. The fragment of the Bybee Memo discussing the enhanced interrogation practice of placing a man in a box with a stinging insect is also enlarged to scale. This enlargement is a kind of highlighting. Through it, the language has been made physical, accessible. Under these conditions, the memo and the questions it provokes can be examined and experienced on a personal level.
The installation was inspired by the ‘Bybee Memo’. I had never heard of it before. In Europe we are familiar with stories about certain types of music played to drive prisoners crazy, rendition flights (which couldn’t have been carried out without the complicity of European governments anyway), etc. But I think that the ‘Bybee Memo’ is less well-known here. Is it the same in the USA? Did the installation play with something that the audience
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There seem to be varying degrees of awareness about The Torture Memos (the common name for the Bybee memos), and the CIA’s Enhanced Interrogation program. (Most notably in the press was the detailed practice of waterboarding, a type of enhanced interrogation practice that simulates drowning.) Regardless, I felt first, that it was an important document to (re) consider, and second, that the installation was self-contained and therefore did not depend upon a prior knowledge. The practice of placing a man in a confinement box with an insect was detailed in the Bybee Memo that was released in 2009 when President Obama came to office. I’d heard of the memo before working on this project, but I’d never actually read it (It’s 18 pages of legalese). I have not yet met more than a few people who have. When I in fact did read it, I was shocked – more by its language and (absurdist) ‘empirical’ logic than by the practices it invoked and legalized. I’m interested in things that appear to be obvious or known, but aren’t. I wanted to slow down the memo, focus on it and enlarge it, so that I could really look at it. The Bybee memo successfully changed the definition of torture in the United States for half a year, legalising acts that under the Geneva Convention were considered torture.
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was familiar with or did it reveal the existence of that ‘Bybee Memo’ as well?
architecture
O ctober 2 1 , 2 0 1 1 1 0 : 0 4 A M
architecture of fear One of the reasons why I go through the trouble of taking one bus and two trains in order to get to Z33 in Hasselt is that the art house regularly identifies and confronts phenomena, ideas and flows that characterize or affect contemporary culture. Their new exhibition, Architecture of Fear, examines how feelings of fear pervade our daily life. The show explores how fear has moved from an immediate emotional strategy for survival, the result of a personal experience, to a constant, more abstract, low level feeling that paves the way for new
infrastructures based on security, prevention and ‘risk-management’. Without ever judging or pointing the finger, Architecture of Fear asks visitors to put their anxieties into a broader perspective. Are threats of terrorism, viral diseases, pollution and financial crises entirely unbiased and valid? Have some of them been surreptitiously fashioned by politicians and the media? Are CCTVs in the metro making me feel more secure or less secure, for example? As Frank Furedi, author of Politics of Fear: Beyond Left and Right, explained in an article for Spiked, “The prominent role of fear today merely indicates that it serves as a framework through which we interpret a variety of experiences”.
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From 2003 to 2008, young photographer Charlotte Lybeer spent extended periods of time in gated communities and contemporary theme parks to document how these places, neatly designed around a central theme, managed to give an illusion of safety and dream lifestyle. Strangely enough, she told me when we met for a drink in Antwerp a few weeks ago, living inside gated communities only increases the feeling of unease, the paranoia. Everything is fine and safe as long as you’re among the people you have chosen to live with, those who have the same – architectural but also moral – values as you, but as soon as you step outside and face ‘the real world’, fear takes over much stronger than ever. For her latest project The Villages (commissioned by Z33 for Architecture of Fear), Charlotte visited a variety of places in the world, from luxury shopping villages to holiday resorts and residential districts, which all have in common a fake, idealized Flemish/Dutch architecture. These ‘paradise’ enclaves were created by developers from behind a desk and usually have nothing to do with authenticity or local context. The artificial settings are empty capsules aimed at creating a pleasant environment for mass consumption and tourism.
Orange County, a holiday resort in Turkey with replicas of typical Dutch facades and the windmills of Volendam and Amsterdam Central is particularly striking. It’s a little piece of Holland heaven under a perpetually blue sky and set against the backdrop of mountains. Lybeer also found plenty of Dutch/Flemish architectural clichés in the Belgian designer discount outlet Maasmechelen Village and much more surprisingly in Northeast China, where a Dutch businessman born in China had the ambition of opening Holland Village, an amusement park and residential complex in Shenyang. Holland Village featured replicas of famous Dutch public buildings and windmills. It never opened. The artist’s photos – whether they capture details, passersby or a whole street – perfectly translate the feeling of eeriness that pervades these places. Everything is so neat and pristine that you wonder if people are actually allowed to set foot in this postcardperfect architecture. The facade of the INNTEL Hotel in Zaandam (NL), however, doesn’t attempt to fool anyone. The architect of the building fearlessly piled up several houses of the typical Dutch building tradition on top of each other. Charlotte gave her series the title The Villages because these secluded places replicate the feeling of safety of a village, a place where you know who is who, what to expect and where things appear to be immutable.
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‘The Villages’ empty capsules for dream, Dutch lifestyle
charlotte l y beer
Photo – Charlotte Lybeer
Does getting so close to gated communities and to the people living there make you understand better why one would want to live there or does it have the opposite effect, does it make you feel that a gated community is something best left to paranoid people? More generally, can you refrain from making judgements about their way of life? Because, looking at your photos, it seemed to me that you felt some tenderness towards these people. It’s all very subtle and respectful.
I lived for 2 months in most of the gated communities I photographed, so during that time I try to understand the choice of living in a gated area. I definitely don’t want to generalize it. For some people I understood their reasons, and some people I think are just too scared or not adventurous enough to live inside the ungated world. I question more the idea of project developers and architects who construct that kind of housing, than the people who choose to live in it.
I guess that the reason why you first decided to document a gated community was that you were curious about them but also that you might have had some preconceptions before going there. Were these preconceptions fulfilled or did you find that life in a gated community was nothing like what you had expected?
I always do lots of research before I travel to a certain place. So I’m very much prepared. Nowadays you can find so much information on the internet, it’s almost possible to see every corner of a place virtually. So for the project in China (2007) and Dubai (2008) I selected beforehand the locations I wanted to photograph (sometimes I had already decided on the
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framing) and then I waited until something happened in the framing that made my picture. Of course, I also like to be surprised by the reality of the moment and the place. Sometimes an unexpected glimpse of strong sunlight can make the image or a person who passes by and just fits perfectly in the atmosphere... That’s what I like about documentary photography: the combination of intent and coincidence.
Photo – Charlotte Lybeer
In most places it is not allowed to photograph, so I always ask for permission. I write letters, phone or email the gated communities and most of the time they don’t give me permission. Once I’m there, people are a bit distant in the beginning and they don’t easily trust me. But when I stay in a gated community, I’m everywhere everyday, so they cannot really avoid me. I also look quit innocent, so that helps too. And I try to explain my intentions and be honest about my goals. People appreciate that. Some are even proud their living environment is interesting enough to be photographed. They get used to me after a while. That’s also one of the reasons why I stay there for 2 months, so people have the time to adjust to me and vice versa. I still have contact with some of the elderly people in Florida, they liked my visit a lot, I was a part of the entertainment there.
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One would expect people living in gated communities not to be very open and welcoming to the intruding photographer that you are. How do you get access to them? Do you have to ask for official authorization? Is it a difficult process? How ready to help you are people living there? Which kind of relationship do you form with them?
charlotte l y beer
You’ve investigated and photographed gated communities in several parts of the world, Florida, South Africa, Belgium. Are people’s reasons to live in a closed environment the same wherever you go? What motivates them to seclude themselves from the rest of the city?
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Photo – Charlotte Lybeer
Not at all. In Florida I photographed a gated retirement community. So it’s something between an elderly house and a Club Med. I understand their choice of living there, no traffic, silence, everything they need is within close reach, it is clean, they have many friends... I can understand that a lot of people prefer to spend ther last years of their lives in such an atmosphere, rather than in a small, grey, boring elderly home in Belgium. But I am not saying it would be my choice. In South Africa, safety was the main reason. Families with young children lived there.
architecture
O ctober 2 7 , 2 0 1 1 1 : 3 3 P M
Ilkka Halso’s photos are as seductive as they are traumatic. A few years ago, his portrayal of nature was grim but it showed traces of optimism. In 2000, his Restoration series showed parcels of nature framed by delicate scaffolding that protected, cared for and might even eventually have healed a damaged piece of forest, field or a tree. Three years later, the Museum of Nature showed a much darker view of what reckless human intervention could do to the environment. This time, there’s no way back. Nature can’t be healed anymore. Its vestiges are preserved like works of art. Nature is torn away from nature, kept inside a museum or entertainment park, and maintained courtesy of corporate sponsorship.
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The Museum of Nature
ilkka halso
What happened between Restoration and the Museum of Nature? The photos of Restoration still showed traces of hope whereas Museum of Nature pushes the pessimistic view a little further.
Museum of Nature is really more pessimistic in its approach. What happened was more of a shift of view and mode. Restoration gave a more abstract idea about attitude towards nature and its conservation. Museum of Nature offers a more concrete approach, I make futuristic visions in the hope that I will never see them realised.
The idea of a Museum of Nature is obviously shocking but sadly, it is also quite credible. And so are your images. How did you balance credibility/believability in this concept of a Museum of Nature with the necessity to provoke discomfort and awareness?
I try to make them as real as possible, hoping to keep structures in credible measures. I am aware that when you take a closer look artificial elements are exposed. For me, the point when the viewer stops believing he is looking at a real situation is interesting. Amazement (hopefully) turns into relief, anger or disappointment.
What is the role and importance of beauty/aesthetics in your photos?
It is strongly included. It is an essential part of it. Even if I often choose to photograph beautiful places and then figure out something disturbing to add to them, I believe that even those ruined views and man made parts in them have something to do with beauty, even if it is in the wrong places.
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architecture of fear
And, more generally, which role do you think artists can play in raising awareness about the ecological and other critical issues the world is facing nowadays? Do you feel that people are open to listen to what artists can say?
I hope that there could be some effect but I don’t expect too much. I think that most people are open, but if other personal interests like income or security conflict, awareness of nature is one of the first to be overrun.
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The Global Anxiety Monitor The Global Anxiety Monitor looks live on Google images for anxiety buzzwords in different languages and brings the results of this query side by side. Each language comes up with a different view on terrorism, inflation, crime, injustice, recession, future and climate change. The differences in results are far from trivial, they reveal cultural biases and local concerns. The work makes you hover between a morbid curiosity to see the results of other searches (Will they match this time? Will
they be ever more discordant? And how?) and the desire to forget about war and crimes. Riek Sijbring, Femke Snelting and Renee Turner from De Geuzen manage to engage the public in a critical discussion using tactics as diverse and unconventional as a three course dinner, paper dolls, slogan generators and virtual tours. I’ve been following their work ever since I started blogging. Here are some extracts of the interview I did with them about the work they are currently showing in the exhibition Architecture of Fear:
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architecture of fear
Do you monitor the Global Anxiety Monitor? Check regularly how the stream of fear data influences what appears on the result pages? Draw conclusions from it? Find that the same images are applied to different concepts? Has it changed/reinforced your view on how the media processes and presents information? What have you learnt from the Global Anxiety Monitor?
While playing with the Global Anxiety Monitor I had the feeling that any anxiety I might have harboured was only increasing, finding new reasons to rise. What made you decide to create it?
The Global Anxiety Monitor reflects on the self-perpetuating and self-fulfilling nature of fear. Rather than placating our worries, through search, a world is mirrored back to us, which confirms rather than perhaps challenges those beliefs. Our fears, transmitted through
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The Global Anxiety Monitor is a window into the flow of images; nothing is archived, tracked or saved by De Geuzen. It does not work autonomously, but depends on Google crawls, user images and rankings. The Monitor has been programmed to be continuous; in other words, a script defines the exact time when ‘terrorism’ or any other words will be queried. Display is the only means of seeing what is being monitored, whether you open the work in a browser window on your own computer or look at it in an exhibition space. By continually performing timed searches, it becomes evident that a query is driven by cultural biases and fed by local concerns. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it nonetheless reveals that we occupy different Google worlds at any given moment.
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images, are locally driven and shaped according to context. While Google is used as a ‘tool’, and a search appears open-ended, it is far from neutral. Although simple, language comparison is a means of showing how points of view are not only reflected, but produced through query. It also exposes that while we might globally share the same types of fear, we also locate them very differently depending on where we search from, and what language we use.
You created the Global Anxiety Monitor in 2007. Have new words emerged or grown in importance since that year that you’ve added them to the initial list to be monitored?
Ironically, the terms have remained the same, and most likely similar words would have circulated in the press during the sixties, seventies and so-on. Our anxieties themselves aren’t novel, it’s more the manner in which they are manifested or visualized that is changing. In terms of the significance of specific words, when we first did the project it was situated in the wake of the immediate years following 9/11, and it was a response to the culture of anxiety that arose out of that event. On the surface, much appears to have changed in terms of concerns. For example,the economic crisis has overshadowed the so-called ‘War on Terror’. Although that war still rages on, it doesn’t receive the kind of media attention it once did. However, the most striking query remains ‘terrorism’. This is in part due to the fact that visualizing the economic crisis through something like inflation often results in images of simplified graphs with red arrows, but the images of terrorism are
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october 2 8 , 2 0 1 1 5 : 0 2 P M
Unfortunately, by the time I’m writing these words, Google has changed the rules of its image search and The Global Anxiety Monitor has been disabled.
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dramatic, iconic and specific to each culture. The term conjures up images of deeds, victims and perpetrators, and says something about a sense of nationhood and solidarity, which are constituted through being contrasted to alleged enemies. Other terms, such as protest, have had peaks and then stabilized again. And while we thought the word ‘riot’ would have great fluctuation in English (given the riots in England), the dominant image continued to be that of a rock band. Instead other languages, such as Arabic, saw more fluctuation.
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The architecture of fear surrounds us The architecture of fear has built up increasingly high walls around us over the past decade. Slowly but surely, we’ve been convinced that we are living in dangerous times. Most of the time we don’t pay much attention to the warning signs. Once in a while, however, newspapers remind us that the architecture of fear has reached some outlandish, pathologically ridiculous and in some cases troubling levels... Policemen in London forced tourists to delete photographs of double-deckers and bus stations from their cameras in the name of preventing terrorism.1 Elsewhere in the UK, a grandfather was banned from buying fish and chips after wardens ruled that the food might pose a health and safety risk if it got cold.2
Wealthy citizens in delightful Potsdam are campaigning for a ‘New Berlin Wall’ to protect their sumptuous lifestyle.3 An online game4 launched in the UK (where else?) allows people to watch live CCTV feeds and rewards them when they spot real crimes. I could go on and on, but I’d rather let you know that time has come to rush to your panic room5! Nasa’s Planetary Science Division has indeed found it fit to inform humanity that one of the outcome of greenhouse emissions is that they could tip off aliens that we are a rapidly expanding threat.6
1 http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/apr/16/police-delete-tourist-photos 2 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/5393320/Pensioner-bannedfrom-fish-and-chip-run-over-safety-fears.html 3 http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,621475,00.html 4 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/8293784.stm 5 http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/05/garden/05hidden.html?ei=5090 6 http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/aug/18/aliens-destroyhumanity-protect-civilisations
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Music collective Champ d’Action in dialogue with Architecture of Fear. With the stroboscopic musical performance P-Trains by Ann Eysermans and others. With Ann Eysermans (contrabass), Serge Verstockt (guitar), Arne Deforce (cello) & Kris Delacourt (guitar).
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Champ d’action in architecture of fear
N ovember 7 , 2 0 1 1 7 : 5 9 A M
a conversation with Trevor Paglen I suspect that there are very few places left on this planet that haven’t been discovered by intrepid explorers. Yet, Trevor Paglen has found and investigated territories that still need to be documented and exposed to the world. They are part of Architecture of Fear, an exhibition that examines how feelings of fear pervade our daily life. For his Limit Telephotography series, Paglen used high powered telescopes to picture the ‘black’ sites, a series of secret locations operated by the CIA. Often outside of U.S. territory and legal jurisdiction, these locations do not officially exist. They range from American torture camps in Afghanistan to front companies running airlines whose purpose is to covertly move suspects around. Paradoxically, Paglen’s images deepen the secrecy of their subject rather than that they uncover it. Limit Telephotography most closely resembles astrophotography, a technique that astronomers use to photograph objects that might be trillions of
miles from Earth. Paglen’s subjects might be much closer but still even more difficult to photograph. To the physical distance barrier, one has to add the obstacle of informational concealment. The other photos the artist is showing at Z33 are part of The Other Night Sky which tracks and documents classified American satellites in Earth’s orbit. With the help of a network of amateur ‘satellite observers’ and of a specially designed software model able to describe the orbital motion of classified spacecraft, Paglen could calculate the position and timing of overhead reconnaissance satellite transits. He would then photograph their passage using telescopes and large-format cameras. I’ve seen his work in numerous contexts, from new media art festivals to activist conferences and contemporary art exhibitions. However, the more you see Paglen’s work, the more questions you want to ask him. I’ve finally decided to catch up with him and interviewed him via Skype for the upcoming Z33 catalogue:
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architecture of fear
How does your desire to document and reveal coexist with the need to express yourself as an artist? How does your formation as a geographer feed your art practice and vice versa?
Isn’t all this government secrecy a bit disheartening sometimes? It seems to have no boundaries or end, it even appears to keep on growing. Do you ever feel like it’s time to close the chapter and dedicate your time to a subject that is easier to circumvent? What keeps you going?
Nothing is particularly easy to understand. People have tried for thousands of years to understand flowers. In my case the question is about secrecy and I’m interested in the aesthetics of secrecy as much as I’m interested in politics. What does the State look like now? And looking at secrecy is part of who we are now.
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I guess it’s all mixed-up. For me it’s difficult to dissociate what is geography from what is art or journalism in my practice. Art has its own methods and the same is true for geography and journalism. Each field can give you ways to ask questions and communicate that other fields can’t give you. What I’ve tried to do is make things a bit more complicated. There are artists pretending to be anthropologists or scientists but I’ve asked myself “What happens if art is not some sort of degraded, diluted form of pseudo social science or geography but if it is actually also geography or a social science in its own right?” I’ve always been an artist but ten years ago I started studying geography and social science and I’m trying to be as good at it as someone for whom this is his main profession.
trevor paglen
I’m also interested in the history behind the individual images of Limit Telephotography. How much time, energy does it typically take to get one of those images?
It’s different from one image to another. Each of them has taken enormous time to make. The places they picture are very remote and it takes a long time to get there. I often travel from the Bay Area and it can take a 10 hourdrive to get to my destination. After that I have to hike with my telescope and heavy backpacking. The other thing is that photographs don’t look very good the first time so I have to come back time and time again. One photo took me six years. I went to the location twice every year until I got the image I wanted. That can happen not only because the conditions are not what I want but also because I learn a lot in the process, I learn how to see the place. I need some time before I can understand how a place should look like in photo.
Both Limit Telephotography and The Other Night Sky have received wide press coverage. Did this attention to ‘the black world’ have any consequences for the access to information you had?
It’s easier now! People get in touch with me because they’ve heard of me and because of that, it’s also easier to stay out of trouble. We have this idea that secrecy is this perfectly oiled machine but the secrecy system is not all that organized. Also, we imagine that there is one single brain orchestrating secrecy behind the whole State but this is not the case. There are many contradictions. The secrecy system is internally inconsistent but also incoherent.
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ACCESS – Marie Sester ACCESS is an anonymous tracking system that follows ignorant passers-by with a spotlight and a sound beam. It combines the social control of contemporary surveillance technologies with our desire for entertainment and manipulation. ACCESS travels around the world from one public place to another. ACCESS will be on view at PHL University College, in a public hall in. The tracking system is activated and controlled by the visitors of the ACCESS website www.accessproject.net.
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Niek Kosten (째1986) is a Belgian graphic designer. He graduated in Communications & Multimedia-design and Graphic Design at the Media, Arts and Design Faculty in Genk and Hasselt (MAD-faculty). In his work he focuses on printed matter, identity and typography. Besides that, he initiates projects that explore activist subcultures. In 2011 and 2012 Niek is responsible for the graphic work at Z33 - house for contemporary art. Since 2011 he also teaches graphic design at MAD-faculty.
Z33 would like to thank
As it is impossible to mention every person, we address this word of thanks to all (freelance) collaborators, volunteers, trainees, student jobbers, partners of Z33, Kunstinlimburg.be and Design Platform Limburg, who all with great enthusiasm worked on this project. A special word of thanks to the Audiovisual Studio of the Province of Limburg for the production of the videotaped interviews. Texts Régine Débatty
Photography Kristof Vrancken
Concept Jan Boelen, Régine Débatty, Niek Kosten, Tim Toubac, Kristof Vrancken
Co-publisher MER. Paper Kunsthalle Geldmunt 36 B-9000 Gent t +32 (0)9 329 31 22 f +32 (0)9 329 31 23 info@merpaperkunsthalle.org www.merpaperkunsthalle.org
Editorial coordination Tim Toubac Translations Michael Meert, Liesbet Piessens Printing Haletra Publisher Jan Boelen, Z33
Graphic Design Niek Kosten
ISBN: 9789490693503 Legal deposit: D/2012/7852/122 Distributed by Exhibitions International orders@exhibitionsinternational.be www.exhibitionsinternational.be © 2012 MER. Paper Kunsthalle vzw, Ghent, Belgium
Z33 is an initiative of the Province of Limburg, Culture delegate Gilbert Van Baelen and is supported by the Flemish Community. Zuivelmarkt 33 B-3500 Hasselt t +32 (0)11 29 59 60 f +32 (0)11 29 59 61 info@z33.be www.z33.be
© Z33 — All rights reserved. Nothing from this publication may be multiplied, saved in an automated data file or published, in any form or way (electronically, mechanically, by copying, recording, photographing or in any other way) without prior written authorisation from the publisher. All pictures by Kristof Vrancken unless otherwise indicated. Cover: ‘MASS’, Kris Verdonck, EXHIBITION #1
This book is a logbook, an instrument to look back on the year 2011 in Z33. Z33 is a house for contemporary art that holds a particular fascination for the commonplace things that affect our lives. We kicked off the year with Alter Nature, in which we investigated how man (can) alter nature and how this changes our perspective on the world. Next, Kris Verdonck illustrated the confusion and alienation of man in his environment, and in Architecture of Fear we witnessed how ‘fear’ shapes the world in which we live. It is clear that the year 2011 in Z33 revolved around how man moulds his physical surroundings, based on the questions, doubts and fears he is confronted with. The artists in the exhibitions pose questions and suggest alternatives that often precede or are situated in side tracks of the known mainstream discourse. With their work the artists are bursting our tunnel vision, allowing us to look at things differently. Art really can change the world. The first part of the book is photographer Kristof Vrancken’s non-linear overview of this time segment. Kristof has been our loyal house photographer since 2005. The exhibition photographs all bear his name. For this publication, we have asked him to dig a little deeper and provide his personal view on this Z33 year. The second part of the log presents a different perspective, that of Régine Débatty – blogster, curator and critic. Immersed in the world of contemporary art and design, she has a special interest for artists and projects on the intersection of art, science and society. An ideal match, indeed. Many of the texts published here were posted previously on her blog we-make-money-not-art.com and have already found their way into the blogosphere. This book does not attempt to provide a comprehensive overview. They are two visions, each with their very own narrative. It is a refreshing encounter for those unfamiliar with Z33, and a captivating excursion for those who have already visited Z33.
Jan Boelen, artistic director Z33 – house for contemporary art