Busy days at the Westergasfabriek
After finishing as much as possible of the construction of the archive at the workshop in Weesp, Wednesday morning was time to move the thing to Amsterdam. It’s 3 metres tall and weighs who knows how much, which made this a bit of a challenge. Basically it needed to be disassembled, taken down three floors, and fitted into the back of a hire van. This was not made any easier by the fact that we could not use the lift in the building due to an argument between persons totally unconnected to the project…
In the end it was not too much trouble to get it packed in and sped down the motorway to the Westergasfabriek in Amsterdam. This was a pretty speedy journey because the time limit for deliveries was 12 o’clock – as it turned out, we got through the barriers at 11:55.
First everything had to be hauled into the huge space of the Gashouder, a former gasometer which is the venue in which we are situated. Next it was a case of trying to work out how to put it back together again, followed by work on sorting out the many small problems with it and finishing off the animation mechanism.
By Thursday evening, the whole mechanism was working pretty damn good, if I may say so myself, and should look even better once my colleagues have done their bit and filled the drawers with content. Tomorrow (Saturday) is the opening of the Kunstvlaai, and I can’t wait to see the reaction of the public.
