Ballad of CAUTION, The heroic paraphernalia

May, 2008

“KUNSTVLAAI 7 A.P.I ” exhibition

Gashouder, Westergasfabriek

Amsterdam, the Netherlands

July-September, 2008

Ministry of Education

Den Haag, the Netherlands

Intention: To address and explore fears of a collapsing urban structure. Every city has a common aim to become an effectively functioning metropolitan. In view of this I want to emphasise how visions of an effective and ‘great’ city are most always characterized by ideas of a clean city. It might be a universal wish to work in a pristine office in an urban building with high quality security and cleaning systems. Urban cleaners have improved their technology so much as to keep super clean buildings forever nearly new. They are busy everyday with their well organized compact cleaner carts, sophisticated detergents and all kinds of paraphernalia. They keep a clean base for high quality urban life as a daily ritual, whilst cushioning fears of any emergency sticky situations. Being in such a super clean building generates many kinds of fearful images of possible unfortunate situations, like being bombed by terrorists, folding systems, even a tiny slip like a falling coffee or a cleaning cart falling down the stairs. On the other hand, there is a richness of nature as soon as you leave the city borders. It reminds me that the city has been built on such wild nature. It occurs to me how this wild nature organizes itself with intelligent beauty rather than controlled duty. There has become an increasing divide between the systems of nature (our basic environment) and the urge for highly complex technologies; although both come from complete opposite ends, both ultimately surpass our ability control them. I am interested in the conflicting relationship between environment, technology and the human and how this determines a limit to the efficient function of an urban structure. I build a big bucket, a mop and spray bottle on a cart in order to monumentalize a ‘controlled urbanity’ or an armoured and neurotic vehicle. All these things will be seen as naked structures of thin wood, like some sort of delicate skeleton, fragile and weightless compared to a volume of the whole installation, and a volume of a space of a building, Gashouder of Westergasfabriek. I want to suggest a solidity of structure yet at the same time of a mass of fragility.