Ingrid Commandeur: The current edition of the festival has the following motto: ‘Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when they are created by everybody.’ This is a quote from Jane Jacobs, a Canadian writer and activist, known for her powerful critique of the urban renewal policies of the 1950s in the United States. How do Jacobs’s ideas connect to a public arts festival like ‘De Wereld van Witte de With’ in the year 2010?
Lukas Feireiss: ‘To answer and support the quote by Jane Jacobs with another quote, let me invoke Plato here, one of the earliest city-thinkers in Western history, who in his seminal work on the ideal city and state The Republic rightly said through the words of Socrates that “the city is what it is because our citizens are what they are.” Even though coming from very diverse times and backgrounds with clearly differing objectives, both of these statements on the city bring forward arguments of societal implications. What they have in common, is that they draw a direct analogy between the quality of city life and that of it’s inhabitants. Simply speaking, the city is nothing without the people who live in it. Or to break it down to even simpler terms: The city = the people. With regards to this year’s festival, curated for the first time together with the Dutch artist Ruud Reutelingsperger, I believe that no better motto could have been chosen, as it illustrates the city as interactive, dynamic and living environment of change. It can be read as a manifesto for the participatory design of the city and the proclamation of a new kind of creative counter-urbanism. By adapting and manipulating, rather than by accepting or refusing the existing spatial system of the urban environment, it is the inhabitants and users who are exploring and defining new territories. We need to keep in mind, that even though designed and built by a minority of our society, the city is still inhabited, used and defined by a vast majority. In particular against the backdrop of the often anonymous and depersonalized big city life, it is always reassuring for me, to see our all-too-human, immutable desire for somewhat uniquely individual habitations and our aspiration to leave our very own personal note in everything we do, come to the fore through the people.’
One of your key arguments in recent publications like Urban Interventions. Personal Projects in Public Spaces (Gestalten, 2010) is that ‘arts reveals the hidden creative potential for architecture and the urban environment in inventive ways.
‘What I mean with this, is that the design of the built environment with all its implications is not only at the forefront of political discussion across the globe, but also and particularly amongst a young generation of urban creatives, for whom the city in all its chaotic beauty and challenging diversity represents not only their natural habitat but also their prime area of operation. Art or any kind of creative culture in urban space, whether solicited or not, always contributes an additional layer to the reading and understanding of the city. Very often it displays a unique and highly contextual sense for the creative handling and inspiring transformation and reflection of already existing structures and visual codes within the urban realm. Conceived as a short-term festival of three-days, ‘De Wereld van Witte de With’, firstly offers artists and architects the opportunity to intervene in and/or temporarily recreate urban space in the city-centre of Rotterdam, and secondly, show the city and it’s inhabitants, live and in situ the transformational power of artistic interventions within the urban realm in all it’s creativity and spontaneity. Sure, what we witness here is not built to last, but built to live for the moment. But it is exactly the ephemeral nature of the event, that fuels the long-lasting effect of the festival.’
You are interested in how a new generation of urban creatives react to the city and explore alternative engagements beyond the conventions of architecture and territorial planning. Isn’t there a danger that once embedded in the context of a festival, the more or less subversive reactions of artists to the urban context become easy, consumerable spectacles for the public?
‘The apparent threat of commercialization or sell-out is often argued in the context of the official or institutionalized presentation of so-called urban or street art. Here the argument always evolves around the possible loss of subversity and unsolicitedness of the original artistic modus operandi etc. Apart from the fact that I believe this to be a rather hypocritical discussion, it surely does not pose any danger to ‘De Wereld van Witte de With’. First of all, there’s no big brand or company behind the festival that tries to somewhat incorporate the artistic outputs in their corporate strategies, but a highly passionate and engaged team of believers. And second of all, I believe that the temporal and transient structure and organization of the event is of great advantage for it stimulates the unrehearsed moment of improvisation. It is the interim solution that is being celebrated here. Turning a city street into a open laboratory, propagates an experimental spirit way beyond city limits.’
You stated that there’s ‘a growing shift happening in contemporary art towards performative strategies that reflect a poetic understanding of the theatricality of urban space.’ Can you try to explain how the current stances that artists take differ from the exploration of public spaces in the 1960’s and 1970’s?
‘Since a couple of years, we can notice a topical shift in the contemporary art world: On the one hand towards space in general and on the other hand towards performative approaches that deal rather with complex contextual networks of effects and actions in the built environment. And indeed, thereby it is often not the art work or the performance itself that are at the centre of attention but rather the audience’s reaction to it that becomes the main event. A paradoxical approach lies at the heart of these works. The spatial interventions, I am talking about, seek to engage their audiences in what they are witnessing through the alien nature of the performance itself – engagement through alienation, so to speak. The artistic purpose behind many of these projects seems to be the emotional and intellectual responses of the people who experience it, and the critical heightening of their perceptions in often strangely altered everyday situations in the urban realm. The gradual shift away from the conventional showroom or white cube and into public space, is however nothing new indeed, and finds it’s predecessors and intellectual fathers, as you mentioned, in numerous artistic explorations of the 1960’s and 1970’s from Haus Rucker, to Archigram and Gordon Matta-Clark to mention only a few. But as with all things, history always repeats itself in varying circumstances in slightly changed masquerades.’
What is decidingly ‘contemporary’ in the current use of public space as arena for contemporary art?
‘In the presence of changes in all areas of contemporary life through increased, social and cultural mobility, and ubiquitous networking via communication and information technologies, many of these artistic spatial approaches almost appear to be anachronisms in the face of the dissolution of conventional architectural or artistic terms in the virtual world of the digital age today. It seems as, through their intense preoccupation with the physical presence and haptical qualities of space, these new spatial explorations are somehow taking a stand against being absorbed into the world of the virtual image. With regard to the far-reaching consequences of the increasing urbanization worldwide, and the global reality that the majority of the world population is already and will be even more living in urban areas, it furthermore appears to be only natural that artist today deal with the subject.’
What would be the ideal future for a festival like ‘De Wereld van Witte de With’?
‘Time will tell! But to close with yet another prolific city-thinker, Henri Lefebvre once said: ”Leaving aside representation, ornamentation and decoration, art can become praxis and poiesis on a social scale: the art of living in the city as work of art. In other words, the future of the art is not artistic, but urban.“’
For more information on the practice of Lukas Feireiss see: www.studiolukasfeireiss.com
