LIVING THE CITY weaves together a multitude of perspectives on our increasingly distanced relationships with the city and our co-inhabitants. Embedded in Zuidas, a ‘city in development’ itself, the exhibition not only confronts us with the compromised relations we have with our contemporary urban environments, but also presents pathways beyond detachment, proposing an alternative and celebratory reclaiming of the spaces and situations from which there is a tendency to disconnect. This reclamation of the city offers possibilities for affective encounters rather than isolation from the complex layers of our urban environment, and implores an acknowledgement of the “mutually defining” (1)  relationship we have with our urban surroundings. This interplay between how we affect and how we are affected is central to Living the City, with the works each uniquely exploring the potential in recognising that the structures and contents of our cities are more than simply blurry dots in our peripheral vision.

(…) as if a boundless “universe of non-recognition” is what increasingly holds
the modern urban commons together as a shared structure of feeling. (2)

In the19th century, mass migration to the city from rural areas was seen as a step towards more personal independence and authenticity, offering the possibility to construct a new version of our public self, full of potential with which to navigate through this new context. (3)  However now (and notably remarked upon already in 1903 in a seminal essay by sociologist Georg Simmel titled The Metropolis and Mental Life), the role of the public self is so focused on self-protection from the over-populated and stimulus-saturated streets, that we have moved from independence to alienation, withdrawal, and even fear induced by communal public life. As noted by Kathryn Milun in her exceptional book on urban anxiety, Walter Benjamin claimed that “it was in a mode of distraction (…) that an urbanite came to know his surrounding”. The question then of what we actually see as abstracted human beings in our urban environment becomes a point of contention, with what we deny becoming more revelatory than what we allow in.

Dagmar Keller and Martin Wittwer’s what you want to see is both a question and a statement that beautifully highlights this dislocation. Presenting a desolate view of the city at dusk, the piece grants us access to an intimate auditory exchange between two individuals who we assume lie apart in two of the squares of light that languidly drift by on the screen. We are privy to a conversation, limited by language and a bad ‘connection’, in which two people both need something from the other and seemingly deliver without actually connecting at all. The piece exemplifies the struggle we face in relation to the sense of alienation we are cultivating; the parasitic relationship they have with each other thrives on the position they take of not really having to know the other beyond the surface of how they affect their individual narratives.

At another, less subtle extreme, Mike Stubbs’ Cultural Quarter illustrates how powerfully we have fortified our public mechanisms of defense and denial even in relation to the contexts closest to our personal space. Stubbs voyeuristically documents and comments on a mind-boggling portrayal of community in a random UK neighbourhood where the action centres around a moment of ‘child’s play’. As the adult contingent looks on (beer, cigarettes and food in hand), the gathering of local youth proceeds to dismember a car for pleasure. What incredulously seems to be an entertaining spectacle for those directly involved, we, as objective onlookers, are horrified with the state of what they (we) have become. Stubbs’ revealing piece carries the risk of engagement with what we fundamentally strive to deny, drawing uncomfortable parallels between the state of affairs in this locality and our own everyday behaviour.

City planners have generally solved the fear of otherness through segregation and by making efficient, high-speed traffic flow one of the highest priorities of the supposedly neutral,
rational approach to city planning. (4)

Lines Made By Walking by Carey Young, a projected 35-mm slide work, features the artist repeatedly covering an ordinary trajectory of everyday life. Surrounded by a disconnected mass of fellow commuters, Young’s rhythmic journey of focused concentration on one human being’s place in the urban landscape, leaves a marked visual imprint in the crowd as the piece progresses. The sound and moderate 1 second interval of the slide projector give the impression of movement although the invariable and repetitive context of her actions highlight the stagnant stage on which she leaves her trace. Do others see her? Do they care? Does she? The artist’s personal mandate to mark out her own path in the pack both reinforces and defies the sense of detachment of the individual from public space as she unapologetically, and almost joyously, acts out her own scene of private reclamation.

Shaun Gladwell’s spatial performances exemplify the potential in taking back and re-inhabiting the empty transit zones of urban space. Both Tangara and Woolloomooloo Night, as well as much of Gladwell’s oeuvre, are interventions in particular urban locations that are devoid of activity when not being occupied for very specific, time-limited purposes. In Tangara, the artist uses the generally overlooked architecture of an empty train carriage as his support for a physically demanding performance. In Woolloomooloo Night, a desolate petrol station is inhabited by a capoiera dancer and a curious group of seagulls. Both of these locations are transformed by these acts of physical theatre and illustrate the potential inherent in all of us to rethink and affect our surroundings. Rather than urban rebels to be hauled away by the Cleanaway truck (a very fitting coincidental symbol in Woolloomooloo Night), Gladwell’s performers boldly assume a presence that equally threatens and liberates the public self we protectively shield from difference and disruption in urban communal space.

Space does not become comprehensible to the subject by its being the space of movement;
rather, it becomes space through movement, and as such, it acquires specific properties from the subject’s constitutive functioning in it. (5)

Katja Mater’s Build series is her own personal photographic and physical reconstruction of Zuidas. Unable to reconcile with the elements when setting off to photograph this new urban terrain in particularly harsh Dutch weather, Mater took Zuidas home with her, making its future tangible landscape into a reflection on representation and becoming. Symbolising perhaps what was and anticipating what is to come, Mater recreated Zuidas out of paperback books, the final photographic results of which appear in a series of light boxes. The artistic act of personally and physically building the untouchable vast symbols of modern urban development illuminates a certain desire to claim a piece of the city for ourselves, reflecting on the fast-paced developments in the present and our relationships with them in the future.

Een Nieuwe Wereld (A New World) – Living the City, the work of artists Anna van Asbeck and Kostas Koutsospyros, embodies the interplay between our detached relationship with the architecture and ‘contents’ of the city and our desire for an engaged connection with our spaces of inhabitation. Exploring new ways to relate to the materials of everyday life (garbage, metal, machine parts, sand, water and other urban debris), the artists create an abstract landscape that they perform and transmit to the audience with the help of a small finger camera. What we see is the live sensual creation of the artists filtered through the sensitive eye of the lens, transforming the banal and messy afterthoughts of our urban lives into an aesthetically stunning and empty topography for us to navigate with our eyes. Allowing breathing room for solitude and reflection in the screen for the viewer, as well as the visceral experience of their canvas during their performances, van Asbeck and Koutsospyros create a moment of exchange in which we (and they) can choreograph a uniquely personal version of space and time.

Inciting this space for reflection means disrupting the flow of the everyday. Jeroen Jongeleen’s Influenza/A Little Movement subtly provokes and exploits this moment of interference, slowing our mental traffic and focusing distraction. His viral action of tagging cities with stickers symbolising movement through over 2500 representations of the human hand, is a simple act that meaningfully affects the urban environment on a personal but also shared ground. Disrupting our movements to focus on a visual representation of movement itself, Jongeleen’s stickers leave an urban trail that implores dialogue. As we amble through the city, in this case Zuidas, our narratives in motion are followed by a light human touch that seems to infect and affect our daily goings on. These “small gestures” (6) connect us with the urban contexts upon which the stickers are placed, transforming the overlooked into the visible.

The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life. (7)

As our cities increasingly promote the use of space for transit rather than engagement, the feeling of detachment that dominates our public behaviour intensifies. This state of being has multiple consequences for the individual and society, underscored by an aggressive need to keep our fragile personal narratives intact and to reduce disruption by following the rules that govern public space. However, these meaningful disruptions, as seen in the personal instances proposed by the artists in the exhibition, are where the potential lies. They provoke an abrupt break in the fluidity of our obsessive forward motion and offer threads of connection to that which we use as our living backdrop. For these connections to prosper, the capacity and impact we have as active participants in our urban environment cannot be underestimated. As we become more comfortable in recognising and experimenting with this transformative role, the engagement we foster with the city will extend beyond the surface of the functional and move determinedly towards the meaningful.

Download the PDF version of the exhibition text in english: LIVING THE CITY

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