Het dak eraf (Taking the roof off)
This was my contribution to the collective public space art project ‘Onze Buurt als Woonkamer’ (Our Neighbourhood as a Livingroom) organised by Stichting Jonge Kunst, with nine other artists taking place in Schuilenburg, Amersfoort. The purpose was to make spontaneous and unexpected contact between the visiting artists and residents of the neighbourhood in order to discover new perspectives on daily, inhabited spaces.
Schuilenburg is full of identical apartment blocks. I chose to approach the inhabitants of two of these buildings along the Ariaweg by writing a letter introducing the project and myself and posting it in their mailboxes. My idea was to obtain a self-drawn ‘architectural’ floor plan of each flat. My father is an architect and growing up I was intrigued by how these 2-dimensional drawings could translate to an actual physical, inhabited space. I wanted a uniform mode of response that reflected the uniformity of the flats while revealing the contrasting character and identity of each apartment.
Every Saturday for five weeks I went to the Ariaweg. Of the approximately 150 apartments I talked to about 80 people and asked them to draw a foor plan of their flat. The 25 drawings I received are bounded in a book, and of each drawing I made a sticker and pasted it on their mailbox next to their name.