Far, far, Friesland
There is the possibility that some students from the DAI might participate in a public art project next summer at Kunsthuis SYB in Beetsterzwaag, a small village in Friesland. I suppose Friesland compares a little to the Northwest of Scotland in that it is extremely rural and has its own language (Fries), but that is about it; the place (like most of the Netherlands) is completely, totally flat. I mean not one single landmark of any kind. I have to admit that because of this I would find it really hard to live a long time in one of these tiny places; it seems pretty depressing.
That said, it’s a nice little place. Very peaceful, seemingly quite prosperous, and it felt like a million miles away from Amsterdam, which it kind of is since the journey there involved 2 trains and a bus and took the whole morning.
The project would involve us staying in the cute wee house in the pictures below, making some kind of art that might hopefully engage a little with the people living in the village – they have, perhaps not surprisingly, been not so keen to get involved with what the Kunsthuis has been doing to date. The conclusion is that it is perhaps not worth wasting too much time on them.
Around nine of us plus our mentor Florian made the trip from Amsterdam/Enschede/elsewhere, with the intention of developing a proposal which can be submitted sometime in January. It would not be true to say that anything really concrete came out of this, but we did at least agree to work on the concept of some sort of parallel economy for the village, or something related to economics. It’s a start.
