By Nicola Bozzi
Rollerskating in the Hofpoort building on Rotterdam's 'Day of Architecture'
Rotterdam is sometimes looked down upon by Amsterdammers, but I’ve always been a fan of Erasmus’s city. The convergence of a few – to me, unmissable – event last month led to my umpteenth visit to town.
Any serious art marathon in Rotterdam is due to start on Witte de Withstraat, the city’s densest area when it comes to cultural attractions per square metre. Galleries, media art centres and sophisticated video stores are peppered with a string of ethnic restaurants, with the Surinamese curiously lined up all on one side and the Turkish on the other. At the end of the street, the city’s most renowned museums (most notably the futuristic Netherlands Architecture Institute) are clustered in Museumpark.
I met curator Francesco Stocchi in the hall of the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. He showed me around the opening chapter of the museum’s new ‘Sensory Spaces’ series, which features an installation by Oscar Tuazon. Tuazon, as Stocchi describes it, likes to take architectural elements and turn them around structurally, transforming the way they relate to each other. The American artist’s site-specific intervention at the Boijmans pivots in fact around the door: Tuazon has arranged a set of iron-framed, concrete-based gates (designed in the artist’s characteristic Arte Povera-infused aesthetic) within a set exhibition space, across which pristine walls are drawn consequently. The result is a small maze of semi-aleatory spaces that delivers a confusing wandering experience.
Oscar Tuazon’s installation for ‘Sensory Spaces’ at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
After a quick lunch at a local Surinamese restaurant, I visited the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art on the other side of the street. I was disappointed to find that I had missed a very promising show (Gyz la Rivière’s ‘“Rotterdam 2040”:http://www.rotterdam2040.nl/’, which had centred on a documentary about the city’s identity and was showcased on the ground floor, at the TENT space) by a mere couple of days. I had come across La Rivière’s work in 2012, at the Dolf Henkes Prize for Rotterdam-based artists (which he won) and made a mental note to keep an eye on him. As often happens, though, the note didn’t stick. Inside the Witte de With’s current show upstairs, ‘The World Turned Inside Out’, I decided to lose myself among the old prints about slavery and mysterious exotic artefacts, but it quickly got late and I had to rush away from the urban atmosphere of Rotterdam’s culture street.
Exterior of Atelier van Lieshout’s new AVL-Mundo
A couple bad tram decisions later (and after a short connective ride on the smallest public vehicle ever, an electric car with zip-open doors) I approached the far less upscale location of AVL Mundo. The name refers to the newest project of the collective Atelier van Lieshout’s in their ongoing love affair with Rotterdam’s harbour, which famously started with the independent state the Atelier established there in 2001. (I’m told the experiment was stopped when people started brewing their own beer.) The new venue’s first display, entitled ‘Territory’, features quite a few sculptures and organic architectural environments by the Atelier itself, plus works by a handful of like-minded radicals.
Philippe Meste’s ‘Spermcube’ (2013) installed at AVL-Mundo
The pieces range from macabre design creations to video installations, showcased inside dedicated shipping containers in the courtyard. In one of them, Erik van Lieshout (not related to AVL founder Joep van Lieshout) screens his 2009 work Sex Is Sentimental, in which he exposes his love for his assistant in his signature ironic yet deeply personal manner; in another, Basque performer Itziar Okariz referenced the show’s title by peeing on the floor to mark her territory (it worked really well in the container, sound-wise). Moving on from the yard to the warehouse I encountered other pieces, including a couple art works by Philippe Meste. On one occasion, documented here in a video, the Frenchman attacked and bruised a cruise ship by shooting homemade rockets from a little boat (he was sent to jail afterwards, but only for a few days). The most striking presence in the room, though, is perhaps his buzzing Spermcube (2013), a pretty self-explanatory installation that was yet to collect enough raw material to assume its intended cubical shape. My guide invited me to contribute and handed me a test tube and a flyer; I pocketed the mementos and promised I’ll do it next time.
Exterior of the Submarine Wharf, Rotterdam
I got to the Aqualiner just in time to pick up my girlfriend, who was coming in from Amsterdam, and we caught the ferry to the other side of the Maas. When we arrived at our next destination, the Submarine Wharf, (yes, another harbour location – it is Rotterdam) it was almost closing time, but we were granted a few extra minutes to walk around. The immense hangar has been conveniently taken over by the Boijmans for a five-year art programme that has already brought to the creatively resurgent RDM dock big names like Elmgreen & Dragset and Sarkis (as well as Atelier van Lieshout) to revive the former ship-building depot with impressively upscale installations. This summer, director Sjarel Ex has organized ‘XXXL Painting’, a provocative ensemble bringing large-scale painting to its post-industrial premises.
Jim Shaw’s installation in ‘XXXL Painting’ at the Submarine Wharf
The invited artists – Chris Martin, Jim Shaw and the local Klaas Kloosterboer – have adopted three entirely different spatial strategies to tackle the space. Martin keeps things strictly wall-bound, making the most of the emptiness to display images whose size would be impossible to contemplate elsewhere. Shaw, on the other hand, has set up an impressive and hallucinatory kaleidoscope of perspectives, slicing up the room with giant trompe l’oeil cut-outs and surreal sculptures (including an eerie balloon of a giant baby hanging upside-down from an umbilical chord). Finally, Kloosterboer taps into the venue’s industrial potential by arranging his massive plastic banners on a rotating rail from which they hang like perforated shades, thus dynamically changing the resulting image when they overlap. After taking several pictures of Shaw’s installation (which included a tribute sanctuary to his recently deceased friend and fellow Destroy All Monsters band member, Mike Kelley) we caught the last ferry back to the city centre.
The brutalist ‘Hofpoort’ building
Our last destination was the Hofpoort, a Brutalist tower that used to house the Shell offices before the company left it awkwardly vacant years ago. On the occasion of Architecture Day, local urban office ZUS had opened the building as part of a wider strategy to resuscitate the crisis-stricken office buildings in the city’s Central District. For 24 ours, visitors were allowed to travel up and down in the deserted behemoth and enjoy a diverse range of pleasures. Our entrance to the building was less than grand, however, as we were stuck in a crowded, non-functioning elevator for a few minutes. The situation immediately triggered a domino effect of Ballardian paranoia in my head, but we eventually made it to the 24th floor for dinner. A platter and a few alcoholic beverages later we descended to blow off some steam at the RollerDisco (floor 13), which is by far the most popular feature after the restaurant, and with good reason: no matter how much you suck at rollerskating (and I do, very much), it’s still enjoyable to have the Rotterdam skyline as a 360° backdrop for your balancing failures. After collecting countless sympathetic thumbs-up to our first-time efforts at the discipline, we went down to the second-floor screening room where they were showing Waydowntown, a delightfully low-budget workplace comedy by Gary Burns set in a massive mall in Calgary, Canada. Afterward, we managed to secure a spot in one of the tents in the indoor camping area (floor 11, if I’m not mistaken), after promising we would participate in the yoga session a couple hours later. We did try to keep our promise, but instead decided to leave Hofpoort at around 6am.
Nicola Bozzi is an Amsterdam-based writer focusing on schizophrenic urban identities. You can follow him at schizocities.com and at twitter.com/schizocities.