FLAT_land 05
Sunday August 2nd 1-5 pm Potahof Delft (nl)

bij wijze van SPREKEN (artist talk) with presentations of Esther Tamboer (nl), Patricia Eustaquio (ph) Paul Santoleri (us) and Sander Zweerts de Jong (nl) about their work at FLAT_land.

_galerij_loop_05_____ (exhibition) with work from Barbara DePonti (it), , Esther Tamboer (nl), Iskra Sguera (it), Patricia Eustaquio (ph) Paul Santoleri (us), Sander Zweerts de Jong (nl) and Sanne Avenhuis (nl).

Barbara DePonti (it)
(in collaboration with Iskra Sguera)
“Speaking things”, the project, satisfies the desire to know a new city, which you have never seen before. The project wants to discover a new urban reality asking the collaboration of every citizen. The citizens will be actively involved in the project giving one of their belonging and then explaining its affective value and/or symbolic value. Collecting the objects will be the first point of contact between the artist and the people, and a first approach to the place. When enough object will be collected for every district and neighbourhood the artists will position them. The whole roof of an apartment will be covered with a large Delft map. The objects will be placed below the streets and houses they belong to. They will be hanging with a strip of paper that will describe each story as it was described by their owners. The work will fill up the room with hanging objects that all talk about the city of Delft, anyone with its own specific message. The project will place the city of Delft in an interior space that will become domestic and warm thanks to the “speaking things”. At the same time the “speaking things” will bring the visitor outside the walls with his mind, around every zone of the city with the entire story that describes them. ww

Esther Tamboer (nl)
My apartment reveals an in between space where I experience an unspoken sense of emptiness, meanwhile I feel confronted with my own being. The void appears to me as an undecided space / time, which carries a slightly sad atmosphere. As I steam off wallpaper I slowly undress the layered surface and relieve it from past energy. I feel connected to the naked wall, allowing me to write a history of my own. I relate to the set-up of the apartment, ignoring the original blueprint for the space. I tend to move out of the structural environment, and place my body partly outside the building.In this distant place, literally high above daily routines I finally turn a heavy emptiness into a playful experiment, like a lucid dream; I’m in control. I like to deconstruct aspects of life in order to reconstruct another (parallel) reality. Within this process I face many fixed habits and so-called truths, outside and within myself. These obstacles are to be unravelled. While using proportion, scale and distortion as tools I attempt to relate to a project in a performing and physical way. As I shift the context, existing ideas and perspectives may need some reconsideration. www

Patricia Eustaquio (ph)
My works weave objects into a narrative and rely on the spaces in between what is actually there. The objects serve as clues, to complete the puzzles in our heads while our mind-cogs grind into the social, archaeological and art-historical spheres that our lives encounter. The idea of Poptahof as a space, and of Delft as its context, is a playground for material that is both palpable and conceptual, and it seems appropriate to create a dialogue for these materials in a domestic sense: a reference to the residency as the well as the home and the community in general. Being in Poptahof for me is like walking into a garden that vibrates with the comings and goings of children and commuters and retirees whose activities seem to explode into chaos that is tempered by quiet blocks of brick and greenery. I see the community as an overgrown garden where green, whether flowers or weeds, are beautiful, untended and unruly. I see it as a home where people have lived in for so long, or changed so frequently, their shadows are permanently engraved on the walls, like fossils unearthed from sheets of rock. My idea is to represent such impressions into objects and transform the little spaces in my studio into snapshots of this community existence. For the next three months, I shall be collecting discards as well as flea market finds and will be transforming these into an overgrown garden, and a petrified living space. www

Paul Santoleri (us)
Ink drawing direct on the wall, I travel light, though my baggage is marked heavy- I draw from fragments, from sketches and photos, to make the drawing in the space… I’ll also show some small pieces and photos of street interventions. It’s inspired by the lichen in Finland, the graffiti & sculptures in France and Germany and being here in the Netherlands. I often have had a studio in a building soon to be demolished or renovated. There’s something fleeting and final about working in spaces like this, every morning I hear them clean out another apartment, filling another dumpster, Doom daily creeping ever closer. The buildings, I imagine, like most concrete structures will be sand on the beaches of tomorrow. www

Sander Zweerts de Jong (nl)
In Flat 603 I started a project called “The s. method”. It’s a research about the possibility to change my life. Most people are happily living in one of the suitable chambers of our society. Brought in a specific way, they know how to handle, how to react, how to live. I am one of those people. Living my life. Full of routines, full of repetitive moves, and with al lot of formal ideas. And having fun. Nothing to be ashamed of, so I believe. But there is always this important question in the back of my head: Is this the right life, is this the perfect life, is this the only way I can live? In “The s. method” I will try to achieve a new way of life. In this first step in Flat 603 I will do research about the variety of possibilities in which the western (in particular Dutch) people are living their life. How similar or different are these lives? In Flat 603 there will be a presentation of these researches, including my first steps in trying to change my life. This project will finally result in a new way of life, which will be documented in a yearly booklet. So “The s. method” will be a lifelong project. The presentation in Flat 603 is the first of hopefully many presentations about “The s. method”. www

Sanne Avenhuis
Humans and animals play central figures in my work. I make drawings, objects and installations. A recurring theme in my work is the imperfect human. In my world, he fulfills the role of both perpetrator and victim. Alienated from himself and his surroundings, he tries to understand himself and his surroundings. In this quest he is dealing with complex situations, conflicting interests, emotions and observations that lead to inner conflicts. In my work I explore the impact of these inner conflicts on an abstract mental and imaginary level. I use very recognizable forms, but usually something is never exactly what it appears to be. The animals are dog-like, rat-like or insect-like, but never a dog, a rat or an insect. I try bringing elements of beauty, fragility and innocence together with its contradictions and yet again pulling apart from each other. With those created situations I am questioning the audience as to what it is that they witness and what the situation was before they witness this situation (similar to an agent who witness a crime scene). Furthermore a somewhat absurdist world confronts with the imaginary experience world of the spectator, which I would like to question. www