FLAT_land 07
Sunday October 25th 2-5 pm Potahof Delft (nl)

bij wijze van SPREKEN (artist talk) with presentations of Alison Owen (us), Anja Sijben (nl), Janne Eraker (no), and Mary Jo Gilligan (ie) about their work at FLAT_land.

_galerij_loop_07_____ (exhibition) with work from Alison Owen (us), Anja Sijben (nl), Barbara DePonti (it), Beorn Lebenstedt (de Brigitte Spiegeler (nl), Catharina Geraedts (nl), Freshn the Impression (au), Inge Hoefnagel (nl), Janne Eraker (no), Juan Duque (co), Kim Schonewille (nl), Maarten Punselie (nl), Mary Jo Gilligan (ie), Matthijs Kiel (nl), Matthijs M. Jansen (nl), Meg Mercx (nl), Patricia Eustaquio (ph), Paul Santoleri (us), Peter Owen (us), Rob Verwer (nl), Rob Visje (nl). Rolina Nell (nl), Ruth Rosendaal (nl), Sara ten Westenend (nl) and Simon Dirkse (nl).

Alison Owen (us)
Each of my installations is created on site in direct response to the physical and emotional characteristics of the architecture. Working with simple materials – thread, masking tape, paper, dirt, and found objects – I construct installations that subtly alter the space. The resulting works draw upon my impulse to investigate and make sense of my surroundings. I consider my work to be drawing-based, but rather than working in two-dimensions with pencil on paper, I draw in three dimensions with materials both tangible (cut paper, thread, paint) and ethereal (light and shadow). Like drawing, the work results in a series of marks upon the space that reveal the process of intense observation, interpretation and recording. The installation at FLAT_land presents artifacts of domestic experience. I collected or created objects that have some relationship to decoration, such as picture frames, potted plants, and wallpaper, and yet are one step removed from their original manifestation. They are flipped, emptied out, or recreated out of unsuitable material. In this space, layers have been stripped away and new layers have been added, and a balance has been reached between my work and the existing space. www

Audio Compost: Kim Schonewille, Maarten Punse-lie en Matthijs M. Jansen (nl)
Liquid Swords (musicvideo): Liquid swords is about dealing anger, pain and fear. The dancing with knifes symbolizes cutting traumas of the past to live in peace in the present. 528HZ: Noodle (self operating patch) on an analogue modular synthesizer. 528HZ is the frequency genetic biochemists use to repair damaged DNA. Some people believe it’s the love frequency The observer: Four security camera’s shown on one screen A quantum universe is an observer created universe. Speed of the void. www

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. www

Brigitte Spiegeler (nl)
Fictive, constructed and deconstructed locations are used as reflection models for contemporary life. Offering distraction, amazement and consolation. Performing different roles every time and using fiction, history, memory, magnification, reduction and confusion, the work depicts how we deal with time, form, space and ourselves. “Is anyone home?” - The question posed by the artist is in fact addressed to the artist herself. Implied is the possibility of bringing memories back to the present, of experiencing the present differently. The work is, we now realize, an artistically formulated plea for boundless freedom of life and living, the freedom to slip into ever new and different roles - just as one used to do in one’s everyday life as a child - and hence the freedom to choose one’s own way of dropping out of our world of atrocities, violence, lost causes, humiliations and emotional coldness’.
Uwe Schramm, Director Kunsthaus Essen, Germany www

Ideal man house: Anja Sijben, Catharina Geraedts, Meg Mercx, Rob Verwer and Rob Visje (nl)
Anja Sijben: The ideal man, the ideal human being, with what kind of men would the current society be more ideal. Ideal as utopian, or even destroy the realism of the ideal and see and experience what there is now at this moment and investigate the man and people around me from there on. In my work it is definitely not the fancy man in the magazine. I am not triggered from the glossy outside but more what comes from inside out. For sure the invited artists will have total different idea(l)s about this subject! For two years I have worked on my ideal man project. It exists out of drawings, paintings, photos, videos installations and researches. In Delft it is a challenge for me to interact with the other artists through collaborative discussion or even a collaborative work. I suggested to build a laboratory from which inspiration and discussion can develop. From this I want to allow the ideal man to emerge again and invite visitors to take part in the ideal man research. www
Catharina Geraedts:The subject “ideal man” is new for me. My first thoughts of creating ‘ideal men’ brought me back to my collected videos and photos about power struggles, ranking order, oppression or fear play. By separating videos or photos from their original context, extreme isolation or merging and developing a different feeling and meaning to it, I create an intensification of my perception. I do collect images and sounds from everywhere. Here in Delft I intend to go through my archive of photos and videos in search of my viewpoint of the ideal man. Possibly extend this with images and sounds in the local environment. www
Meg Mercx and Rob Verwer: ‘A cute butt, sweet, handsome and funny’ are the most mentioned characteristics of the ideal man, posted by interviewed youngsters between fourteen and sixteen years. ‘An ideal man is a man who does what he has to do’ says friend Piet (56 years old). These and much more expressions and brainwaves are what we will try to transform into the somehow tangible, audible and loveable ideal man/men in the ideal man house.www www
Rob Visje: Vulnerable man or porn star. Even men are human beings. After a disastrous identity-crisis the man nowadays can choose his own role upon women. If he can believe it or bear it he can be macho or hypersensitive. These themes manifest in my work in Delft. www
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Inge Hoefnagel (nl)
Inge Hoefnagel lives and works in Rotterdam, but finds the inspiration for her work mainly outside her normal habitat, preferably in the Sahara belt. The sketches she produces there, form the basis for three dimensional art. The themes of the last years have been genetic manupulation and climate change.
This time Inge will visit the deserts of Morocco from 11 till 24 October. On 25 October she will show her new work. Her quest will be for symbols, markers, signs and routes; the legend of her travels. www

Juan Duque (co)
The presence of landscapes. My work is about the processes of deterritorialization of images, places and objects. By producing in situ installations I am challenging pre-existing conditions on a specific site. The main of my actions is to set up a place for ‘emerged new conditions’. Using different media I manipulate images, objects and space in an archaeological way. It is difficult to get rid of the palimpsest though: the memories present on the site are constantly inducing strategies related to the dynamics and systems present in nature which I call ‘transversal strategies’ As a result, areas of intensity, disruption and uncertainty appear in my work, linked to behaviours such as interconnectivity, mutability, and interference. These are added layers, stepping stones for new arguments and situations. www

Mary-Jo Gilligan (ir)
My residency has been a continuation of my investigations into sensory awareness of architecture. Potahof’s current stream of outgoing long term residents and influx short term residents has been of particular interest to my research and has stimulated me to consider the relationship between immediate objective empiricical awareness of a space and memory as subjective awareness of a space. Through various surveys I have been actively engaging residents to share their impression of buildings and this will be archived with the architectural research body Dublin City Agency for the Sensory Investigation of Constructed Space. www

Matthijs Kiel (nl)
During the FLAT_land project I focused on decay and fragmentation to come to an imaginairy world of serten consequences of events. This time in the shape of a larger sculpture that seems to come off of the building. This is situated at the foot of the Flat in the bushes. It is the result of earlier try outs presented at FLAT_land and where focused on gravity, weight and elements refering to landscapes. 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. The almost violent tearing down and reconstruction going on outside to me seem to beg for a different kind of renovation indoors, and my idea is to transform the studio into an unexpected space amid this ‘violence’: to allow the space to use up the material inside and play with the elements streaming in from the outside. For the last three months, I have been collecting discards as well as flea market finds and have been transforming these into an overgrown garden, or 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

Peter Owen (us)
I make drawings and paintings that encompass personal experience, public spaces, and the collective memory and narrative of cities. For this residency, I am creating a series of drawings using as source material specific architectural elements of the surrounding neighborhood. The drawings indicate the simultaneous renewal and entropy that transforms cities over time. www

Rolina Nell (nl)
I make site specific paintings/murals and work with acrylic paint on canvas. My paintings often express my curiosity concerning women’s roles within a social and cultural structure. My work captures and isolates images of ordinary woman and girls; so common that it is usually overseen. They almost get absorbed by there surrounding, but despite of this it seems they turn their back to you and do what ever they like. It is mysterious who they are; their identities are only given by clothing and decorations. In spite of the colorfull forms, funny garments and details the paintings also have a feeling of sadness. My interest in unravel the existence of ordinary things generally invokes a feeling of emptiness and a sad look on the past or unfulfilled desires. www

Sara ten Westenend (nl)
The two basic artistic assumptions that characterize my work are stillness and redefining. These assumptions become visible in my three-dimensional work, by doing interventions and writing texts. I use everyday objects from my direct environment for my research, in which image and language are closely connected. I have started a new research, in which the thin border between the imaginary and the real, between thinking and seeing, is being investigated. Where does the image come into existence? Is the image something static, or is it a constant movement between seeing and thinking? How do you present the image in the reality of space? In this research I want to use different media, show how they represent different realities, and explore how I can move be-tween them. From drawing to photo to intervention to text. I see my stay at id11 as the beginning of this long term research.

Simon Dirkse (nl)
The measures of each space, the proportions of the surfaces of the rooms and other connections between the spaces are a base for the arise of a design for example on a wall or a 3d-object. I use materials in stock (available) or materials generated by the process. By means off this ‘game’ the spaces enter in a new world under the protecion of the ‘eye’ of the MAGUS. Preparing the MAGUS 22 for the arrival of the mysterious guests, drowned in blacklight.

TAP 1 and 2: Janne Eraker, Ruth Rosendaal and Beorn Lebenstedt (nl)
Janne Eraker has invited Ruth Rosendaal and Beorn Lebenstedt to start working on two different experiments with her. With Ruth she wants to make a choreography to some old Tom & Jerry cartoons. We want to try to ad tap-sounds to the soundtrack, or even replace the soundtrack with different tap-sounds. We will focus on timing, precision and making a variation of sounds. Also, we are curious how the combination of video-images, sound and the two tappers will look as a performance. Beorn and Janne will search for simple possibilities to trigger electronic sound with tapdance-movements / tap-sounds. We want to see if we can find a new way to tapdance-compositions, live or recorded. At first we will concentrate only on sound, but later we might be able to adjust the methods to a combination with visuals. www