Zenne Atlas
exhibition, talk
ZENNE ATLAS
Periferia Festival, Brussel, 2019
During the Periferia Festival, I presented a lecture performance in which I reactivated the Zenne Atlas (a work that I created in 2015) and talked about the river as fringe and backside of the city and society. The presentation took place in a beautiful orchard close to the farm and artist studio of painter Felix De Boeck (1898 – 1995), in Drogenbos.
The work consists of a lecture (about 45 minutes) performed around a wooden table (roughly 400 x 100 cm) in the form of a river meander on which the Zenne Atlas is presented. People could gather around the table while I talked about a river story by Tjalie Robinson, a Dutch-Indies writer; the history of the Zenne in the city of Brussels; ideas on hygiene and urbanism; and the figure of Hendrik Freerk Tillema, a pharmacist, hygienist and philanthropist who made a fortune in the East Indies by bottling and selling his Hygeia mineral water.
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Installation and performative lecture at Periferia Festival 2019 in Drogenbos, Brussel
ZENNE ATLAS
Corridor Project Space, Amsterdam, 2016
For the exhibition A Particular Scenario I, at Corridor Project Space in Amsterdam, I presented the Zenne Atlas, a collection of photos, sounds and maps I made during my walk along the Zenne river.
Zenne Atlas is part of ‘Transgression/Transition, an exploration of the Senne and its surroundings’, an ongoing research project on the Belgian Zenne river. In April 2015, the project started with a field research along the Senne by walking the 103 km course of the river. The decades-long absence of a comprehensive and interregional planning policy, fueled by the ostrich politics of the three Belgian regions, has made the river into a ‘non-place’ or ‘fringe’. The Senne manifests itself as an area of transgression, meandering through city and countryside. At Corridor the project is presented in a new setup, focusing on the river as an archive of information and happenings.
‘A Particular Scenario’ was a three-series exhibition in which artists from Turkey and the Netherlands collaborated with a writer. The series focused on storytelling as practice in contemporary art and wandered through a different theme, respectively land, water and wind. The project intended to create a personal, aesthetic and political connection between the cities of Amsterdam and Istanbul.
EXHIBITION:
A Particular Scenario I at Corridor Project Space, Amsterdam
PARTICIPANTS:
Serkan Taycan, Paoletta Holst and Christine Bax
