The diary of a Scot in Amsterdam

I have been to see a very interesting piece of theatre today at the Theater Bellevue here in Amsterdam. It was billed as Objektentheater, or “Object Theatre”. What this means is that instead of human actors moving around on a stage as is the normal state of affairs, they had “actors” which were actually small models made from found objects being the stars.

The production was called “Survival, or how to survive Murphy’s law”, and was made by TAMTAM objektentheater from Deventer. It was a Kafka-inspired story about the worst possible set of events that can happen. It was really quite an amazing performance, which I am afraid is very difficult to adequately describe in words. Basically, there stood two people in blue overalls behind a long, shallow table at the front of the theatre. Upon this table was a set comprised of an area of sand, a tree, and a rickety wooden shack; I suppose the idea was that it would represent somewhere in the American west. The central character, K (note again the Kafka connection) was a cute little creature seemingly made out of a piece of horn and some cloth. He, his dog (an old glove), and the various other characters and props in the story were moved around by the two overalled persons. You might think that this would be distracting, but in reality they began to become less noticeable after a while, and only the objects captured the attention. Along with a soundtrack, special effects (including smoke from a tiny smoke machine) and lighting, this formed the basis upon which the story was told. I will not spoil it for anyone who gets the chance to see it elsewhere this year.

The whole performance was really something special, and I would definitely recommend it to anyone.

A bit of a change in the timetable at the DAI this week; we began on Monday with the private group mentor class, followed by a day of discussion relating to the looming menace of the thesis on Tuesday, and studio visits on Wednesday.

An unfortunate turn of events is that it is no longer possible for us to eat in the evening at the DAI – something to do with cooking not being allowed in the building. This means that we all had to decamp every evening to the Balengebouw on the other side of town, which was freezing cold and not exactly very hospitable in any case. The worst of this was sitting through lectures after dinner; it’s pretty hard to concentrate on even a very good lecture when your feet are freezing.

As the week wore on some practical measures were taken to deal with this, but it was still far from ideal. Gabriëlle promised to do something about this before the next DAI week – let’s hope so.

On Thursday we had a long meeting about the future of the Here As The Centre Of The World project, which should see us return to the five cities visited earlier (Beirut, Damascus, Diyarbakir, Taipei, and Khartoum) in small groups this autumn. There had been quite a lot of pessimism and confusion in the group about what exactly we were to be doing there, since the brief as originally announced was simply to present the book which will be shortly published about the project. Going all that way, and having contributed a significant amount to the costs of the project, it seemed like a very half-hearted, disappointing, and poorly thought through conclusion. However, we managed to discuss some proposals which represent an alternative and more active and engaged way of dealing with these forthcoming visits. I am personally a lot more enthusiastic now that there exist proposals for something to be done with the trips.

Finally, Friday marked an interesting departure in that it involved doing something active at the DAI. There were two workshops arranged, one in video and the other in performance. I chose to take part in the second of these, which was lead by Sanne van Rijn. It turned out to be a very enjoyable afternoon of improvised routines and discussion, and a very refreshing alternative to listening all day or waiting on your turn to be visited by a guest tutor. We have three more of these workshops, and I am certainly looking forward to the next one.

We had a very nice meal this evening – Sushi as prepared by Jae-min and Astrid. It was I believe not so very easy getting together all the necessary ingredients, but it was delicious all the same. Here’s a photo of the lovely Eastern morsels.

I have been very busy building things these days. My most recent project is one of the most complicated that I have yet attempted, but I think I am actually making some progress with it.

It is a sort of robot, in fact more of a machine tool which can be computer controlled. The idea is that it will in time become a type of devoted assistant, performing all types of intricate work for me. A slave if you will.

Not only that, but I have found the time to create a page about it on my other website, which I hope to do a bit more often from now on. I am always involved in some sort of project, but I don’t generally write about that here because they can be quite long, drawn out, and not especially interesting to write about. The other site will be more of a permanent archive, whereas here will be more day to day.

To graduate from the DAI, we need to have produced three things;

1. A website
2. A thesis
3. A publication

The first of these two are fairly self-explanitory, but it is the third which is a bit different. The idea is that we work in collaboration with a student from the Werkplaats Typografie in Arnhem, a sister school of the DAI which offers a masters programme in graphic design and typography. We have a small budget (about €1000) each to produce and print a publication (book(let), poster, etc) which should be about our work as artists. Of course, it remains open what form this will take, but the idea is certainly that the publication become something of a work in itself, rather than simply a catalogue.

We have had several meetings about this earlier, but today was our first visit to the Werkplaats. We would present our work to the designers, they would do likewise, and then the working collaborations would be arranged. I have to admit that I found the whole experience quite stressful, like a job interview or application process that lasts a whole bloody day. The idea is that after everybody had shown their work, we would all list our preferred partners with a first, second, and third choice, and hopefully this would match up fairly neatly. My biggest and most paranoid fear was of course that nobody would want to work with me at all, or only somebody whose work I could not stand, but in the end it turned out to be pretty OK; I was paired with a woman from Brazil named Cecilia who was in fact my first choice to work with. I hope she will find it not too difficult working with me!

This whole horrible process took most of the day, after which time we had a discussion about how we would proceed with working together; I have very little experience of collaboration, and thought it was important to say so. What I find the most difficult is knowing where the boundaries lie between my remit and hers. For example, I am supposed to supply the content while the designer takes care of the, well, design. Since I myself have a background in design before I became involved in visual art, and since I always love to get involved in every detail of the things I am making, this is very weird for me. I do very much hope though that it works out.

Of course with Andy moved out, the place was feeling a bit empty. More to the point, the rent ain’t gonna pay itself, so we had made some enquiries towards finding his replacement. As it happened, this was not very difficult at all since Laura’s old flatmate from Glasgow, Kjetil, was up for coming to live in Holland for a while. I was certainly very happy indeed to have a familiar face moving in, since I have learned through traumatic past experiences that you never know what you’re getting into when sharing a house with strangers. My standards are pretty basic; pay the rent on time, keep it fairly clean (but not too clean), and don’t steal my things. Other than that, I am pretty fucking flexible.

It’s nice to have somewhere in a tidy sort of state when moving in to a new house, so since Kjetil was arriving this evening I thought it would be a good opportunity for an (early) spring clean. The inside of the fridge in particular was pretty disgusting, and the bathroom also needed quite a bit of attention. I can’t say that I am very fond of cleaning, but when you get into it it’s actually not so bad; the fact that I need to sit down and work on my thesis for the DAI certainly made any kind of diversion such as this much more attractive.

So then, around 11pm there comes a ring at our from door, and it’s Laura and Kjetil. “This is weird!” remarks Laura, and with good cause; we three have many times sat at home in the same living room, but now it’s in another country. “Welcome home!” I said to Kjetil, for want of something better to say. He looked a little shell-shocked, and I couldn’t help remembering my very first night after arriving in Holland. It’s a weird, weird feeling to be thinking “I live here now!”, and nothing like being on holiday. Here’s hoping he fits in OK.

As explained previously, Andy & Laura have recently found a house in Amsterdam-Noord. Today the day finally came for moving, which I was of course happy to help with. Thankfully this was not such a horrendous endurance test as the last time, which was a good thing since I had been out till very late last night with some folks from the DAI and had of course sunk quite a lot of beer.

The lack of much in the way of furniture, plus the fact that this time everything was going down our very narrow staircase, meant that it was all in the van in well under an hour. A quick trip under the IJ later and we were in Noord and ready to unload, but not before some trouble with parking; Laura didn’t feel up to reverse parking the van next to their front door, and so I stupidly volunteered to do it. I forgot to mention of course that I have never driven on the right, and in fact have not driven any vehicle of any kind for about four years or so. It is very strange to suddenly have everything swapped around, plus the thing was an automatic, which is also new to me. I thought things were going OK, when suddenly I heard a horn blaring from behind; there was a car driving up the right hand side of me which I had not seen and which I was about to drive right into. The man driving it was not impressed.

In the end I did get it parked OK, but stupidly with the side door facing away from the house, so it wasn’t really much easier than where we had been to start with. Think I’ll stick with my bike from now on.