The diary of a Scot in Amsterdam

At last the day had come to present the results of our efforts in Beetsterzwaag. The idea was that the rest of the folks from the DAI would arrive around lunchtime, and we would then begin a little tour of the village and beyond with the various works being presented along the way. This gave us a few hours in the morning to get everything finished.

I was first of all busy with installing the wall piece which I had prepared earlier in the week at the DAI. This consisted of self-adhesive vinyl letters in two colours which were to be stuck directly onto a white wall. Since the walls were pretty dirty with the remnants of previous work, I had decided last night to paint the area I was going to use, but the problem with this was that the wall surface was still slightly damp this morning. As a result, the letters didn’t stick quite as well as I would have liked. It worked out in the end, although not without a lot of sweating, shouting, and swearing.

With that completed, myself and Bani needed to put together some sort of presentation to complement that of yesterday evening. Since the audience in this case was different, not to mention the language (it needed to be in English this time), we needed to re-work it quite a lot. Also, yesterday’s was in a way a kind of performance, whilst today we were not “in character” as such, but talking in a more objective way. Needless to say, the guests were arriving and we were still not quite finished.

Once the whole party had assembled in the back garden of the Kunsthuis, we had a quick lunch and and an introductory talk by Maarten before setting off in a convoy of cars and a minibus to see the first work, by Emily, which was way out of town next to Gorredijk. After this, we headed back to the Kunsthuis for myself and Bani’s effort; this went pretty well and raised some laughs, although poor Bani couldn’t get a word in edgeways as I launched into my salesman-like spiel; this was certainly not the intention, and was more a product of my nervousness than a desire to grab all the attention. In the heat of the moment it’s not always easy to stay aware of what’s going on around you.

There then followed presentations by Maciej and Jae-min about their canoe journey from Enschede, ice cream and a video show from Jolanda, work from Kamila, Pavlina and Adamantia, Rana, a game with ropes in the park from Daniëlle and Anna, a video installation by Astrid, more talk from me (this time about the words/letters installation), and finally an “art production line” in the garden. This was directed by Nikos and involving a team of “workers” from amongst the DAI students, myself included. We were to fill in a series of cards with little inked rubber stamps, and I am ashamed to say that I was absolutely terrible at it; almost everyone else had finished their bit and I was still trying to figure out what I was supposed to be doing.

This embarrassment over, we enjoyed a delicious finger buffet (I cringe as I type these words) in the garden before most of the group headed off home. After some hesitation I decided that I would stay one more night and make a relaxed journey back to Amsterdam tomorrow, a decision made much easier when it was discovered that there was still a huge supply of beer left in the kitchen upstairs!

Julien has been talking for a while about a project which he wished to carry out involving turning a horse into a sort of musical device; thankfully the creature would not be harmed during this experiment. He had managed to find a man near to Beetsterzwaag who could help with this, and so we set off in the evening to see what could be arranged.

As it happened, this didn’t go as smoothly as planned (the guy always rides with a carriage and Julien really wanted someone on the horse), but what was interesting was that afterwards we stumbled upon a small and creepy graveyard down a lane in the countryside, full of ancient, moss-covered gravestones at strange angles and rusted iron railings; a lone belltower completed the spookyness…

Back at Kunsthuis SYB, the huge pile of dishes needing cleaned was simply too much to be tackled, and the decision was taken that they could wait until the morning. So ended a long but exciting day.

We had quite an early start this morning, since we were being picked up by a minibus in front of the DAI at 8.30am to be taken to Beetsterzwaag. I was pretty tired after working very hard last night, and got an uncomfortable hour or so of sleep with a rolled-up jumper between my head and the window of the bus. Lovely weather awaited us in Beetsterzwaag, though, and our first and not very arduous action was to have some lunch in the back garden.

I was really nervous because myself and Bani had arranged to give a “presentation” to interested parties of the village about our “virtual” construction project. We had gone to great lengths to arrange this, with slides, “Getting Better” by the Beatles as our intro music (since our project was entitled SYB wordt beter in Beetsterzwaag – “SYB is getting better in Beetsterzwaag”), and best of all we had brought our suits so as to appear like proper businessmen. I am always looking for excuses to wear my green tweed suit, purchased for £4 from a charity shop on Dumbarton Road in Glasgow many years ago. This seemed like a good one.

In the end only one person from the village attended; luckily some DAI students and Martin (our tutor) were there to make up the numbers. I was quite disappointed, but then again one is a whole lot more than none, and the guy who did turn up seemed pretty interested in what we were doing and had lots of questions.

An explanation for why there was no-one there, aside from that perhaps no-one was interested, was that at pretty much the same time as we were planning to speak a huge parade of local people accompanied by a brass band walked by. Seemingly this is a regular event at this time of year, taking place every night for four nights. If we’d known about this perhaps we could have planned things a bit better…

Our presentation was certainly an interesting experience, and an important part of the work which we are making, so I am not that annoyed that people didn’t come. It would have been a lot scarier in any case if they had!

Afterwards we once again had a tasty meal together, this time cooked by Bani, and since Rana (the youngest of our group) turns 24 today, there was not one but two sorts of cake to be eaten.

It’ll be a busy day tomorrow for sure with our final presentations.

Halfway through another week at the DAI, and I have narrowly escaped horrific injury. After having no studio visits whatsoever in April, I had three today; this was not ideal, since we need to get everything ready for our final presentations in Beetsterzwaag tomorrow and on Friday.

More haste, less speed so they say. Well, what happened was that I was cycling back from the campus shop at great speed with a camera in one hand and a banana in the other, which was pretty stupid, and ended up cycling straight into a man who was coming the other way.

We both flew off our bikes, my banana became instantly pulped, but thankfully there wasn’t too much more damage aside from a big red mark on my leg. I was very lucky not to break my finger though; it was just centimeters away from being crushed against the oncoming bicycle. Luckily the man was not too upset although it was clearly my fault.

Still in one piece I headed back (more slowly) to the DAI to my next meeting, in between stopping to check on progress of a large graphic which I am having cut from self-adhesive vinyl, based upon my research last week on language; more pictures of this when it has been installed in SYB!

The tutors are also tense at the moment about the external assesments which are currently taking place. One nice side-effect of this is that instead of having lunch in the canteen today, we had a picnic on the lawn. If only the weather allowed this all the time…

I have been back up north in Friesland for a few days. Our project website is finally ready (www.neubuilt.com), and the leaflets and brochures which we ordered last week have arrived; I’m quite pleased with the results.

In addition to the said “virtual serious joke/imaginary construction project” with Bani, I had planned another project of my own. This would involve investigating the relationship between words, and specfically languages. For example, the word “slim” exists in both Dutch and English but has a completely different meaning (it means “clever” or “smart” in Dutch).

My plan was to investigate people’s impressions of different words using a series of cards with a word on each side. One side would contain a word only existing in Dutch, the other side a so-called “false friend” such as the example above. The more people chose a certain word, the more votes it would get. I would then repeat this with a similar set of cards with English words, and use the combined votes to produce a wall illustration mapping the relative importance of individual words. Words with more votes would be larger, and vice versa.

Well, that’s the theory. Here’s me busy collecting votes from the folks of Beetsterzwaag!

Last night I was busy assisting Rana with her project; writing the word “WOLF” hundreds of time in chalk with a template on the streets of the village. She wanted to do this in the middle of the night, and I have to say that this word in an seemingly-endless series in the stillness of 4am under sodium streetlights certainly was quite powerful, spooky even.

Oh, and Jae-Min and Maciej have been busy wrapping their canoe in bubble-wrap, as can be seen.

After a peaceful 8 days in Beetsterzwaag, it was time to return back to Amsterdam and normal life. This included work, a shift in the Sláinte, a barbeque with some DAI folks round at Kristiina’s, helping Astrid move house, and last but not least a few desparate phone calls from a couple of the second year students at the DAI; their theses (that’s the plural of thesis, apparently) need to handed in this week, in English, and so as one of the few native speakers on the course I was suddenly in demand as a proof-reader. It’s nice to feel wanted, although it also brings terrible feelings of responsibility. When you’ve 14000 words or so to read, it’s easy to miss a “there” where a “their” should be.

I am keen to take advantage of my new OV-kaart as much as possible, so it will be back to Beetsterzwaag tomorrow.

This evening the girls in the house (it’ll be the boy’s turn tomorrow) prepared a delicious meal. Christ, this is sounding just like Big Brother.

Anyway, we ate lovely things, including some peppers, mushrooms and baking potatoes cooked in the little barbeque at the back of the house. Later we huddled round the barbeque in the dark and drank cheap whisky until late, which is what artists are supposed to do, of course.

Bani had to leave today due to his leaving for Denmark in a few days, so we were busy making sure that there was nothing else we needed to work on together before this; I’m on my own from now on.

Later Maciej and Jae-Min, who had embarked upon a heroic canoe trip from Enschede to Beetsterzwaag, arrived at the Kunsthuis. Looking exhausted and slightly sunburned as they were, they still seemed pretty glad to be here. However, they could not get quite all the way to the village, and so we all set off to collect the canoe from where it lay, about 2km to the west next to the motorway.

Moving a very heavy aluminium canoe such a distance was not easy though, even with four people. We tried dragging it, pushing it, carrying it sideways, and also above our heads, before deciding that most effective way was to pull it along the grass verge beside the road. It was certainly a bizarre sight when we reached the village itself, as the photos prove.

Anna and Daniëlle also arrived around the same time, so that all at once the place seemed a lot more lively. It’s been nice having such a quiet existence here, but all the same it is also nice to have some company.

After two days of hard work we finally finished the design for our huge (1.1m x 1.34m) sign this afternoon, and set off in Bani’s van to Groningen to get it printed. It was quite difficult finding a printer who could print this large here in the northern Netherlands, and Groningen was the closest available.

I was quite glad though of the chance though to get out and about and do something other than working at the computer.

Groningen is a small and quite pretty little city, with canals, narrow streets with interesting shops, and lots of green space. Also, its architecture strikes me as quite different to for example Amsterdam – in some respects you could say that it looks quite British.

After delivering the files to the printers, we had one more slightly strange task. Bani plays for the Netherlands’ national Unihockey team (despite being Swiss), and will be travelling to the World Cup in Denmark next week. We were there with his van, and for some reason all the strips necessary for the competition were in boxes in Groningen. So it was then that we found ourselves outside a sports hall separating the strips into two piles for the ladies and gents respectively. An interesting diversion, it must be said.

One thing I couldn’t help noticing was the huge number of flags flying at half mast. I thought at first that someone important had died, before I realised of course that this was the 4th of May, the day of Dodenherdenking (Remembering the dead). Today the Netherlands remembers the more than one hundred thousand Dutch who died in World War II as well as other wars, before the celebration tomorrow of Bevrijdingsdag (Liberation day).

Some friends of Bani’s are studing at the Frank Mohr Institute in Gronginen, so we payed them a visit. Like the DAI it is a masters’ programme, although somewhat different in that most of the students do live here, and there seems to be more people working with traditional visual art forms such as painting and drawing.

After this we had time for a quick beer before heading back to Beetsterzwaag, where Astrid was waiting for us in the one single pub in town. I was struck by how much it reminded me of pubs in small villages back in Scotland, even down to the bottles of Grouse and Teacher’s behind the bar. In fact, there’s a lot about this place which reminds me of living up north before I came to Glasgow almost 10 years ago. I guess small places like this may be much the same everywhere.

The plan was to stay in Beetsterzwaag for about 8 days, during the first part of which Bani and I would get as much as possible done for our project. What we were planning to do, if it can be easily explained, is to set up a “virtual architecture/construction company” and put forwards plans for a dramatic redevlopment of Kunsthuis SYB into an art museum of a scale totally inappropriate for such a small village. The interesting thing would be of course people’s reactions to this – would they believe it? Would they think it was a good idea/terrible idea/completely insane? Like all such jokes, it needed to be close enough to reality to be believable.

What we were going to produce to support this myth is as follows;

• A large sign of the sort usually seen next to construction sites, with a computer-generated 3D model of the new development.
• A website.
• Flyers to distribute round the town.
• Stickers to go with the above.
• Perform a presentation on the opening night of the DAI student’s exhibition (25th May).

All in all quite a lot to organise in a short space of time. During my previous education and employment as an interior designer I picked up quite a lot of experience in 3D modelling, so I was able to take care of that, and of course web design is my job. My task then was to work at a hectic pace behind the computer screen whilst Bani took care of the considerable amount of telephoning and general organising necessary to get things done.

By the end of the day we had got quite far with our 3D expanded Kunsthuis, and I was quite excited about the coming days.

Today I had planned to travel from Amsterdam to Beetsterzwaag (Friesland) where a group of students including myself are taking part in a 5-week-long residency project entitled “The Expanding Pie” as part of our course at the DAI. However, I had received a letter a few days ago telling me that finally, glory of glories, I am eligible for some student support from the Dutch government. Along with a small but very welcome grant, I am entitled to an OV-kaart; what this magic piece of plastic does is allow students to travel anywhere in the Netherlands for absolutely nothing, except at the weekends (or only at the weekends, if you prefer instead). Students in Scotland can only dream about this sort of thing.

Now, here’s the stupid bit. I could only get this card by picking it up in person from a post office in Enschede, which is of course on the opposite side of the country from where I live. I worked out though that it was still worth the while to go via there to pick it up, since it would save such a huge amount. A crazy journey, that’s for sure, but I quite like trains sometimes. Much more than planes, anyhow.

Here’s an outline of my journey;

• Tram to Amsterdam Centraal Station.
• Train to Amersfoort.
• Train to Hengelo.
• Train to Enschede.
• Pick up OV-kaart. Yeah!
• Buy a bath towel for the next week or so in Beetsterzwaag because I forgot to bring one.
• Run very fast with rucksack/shoulder bag/new towel to the station in time to catch a train to Drienerlo (next to the DAI on the outskirts of Enschede).
• Pick up my from the DAI (I keep one there because it’s cheaper than taking my other one back and forth from Amsterdam).
• Train to Zwolle.
• Train to Heerenveen.
• Picked up by Bani in his van.

Suffice to say that I left the house at around 2.20pm and didn’t get to Beetsterzwaag until about 9pm. I could have been to Scotland and back in that time!