1.
Inleiding
In
de nota Beeldende Kunst 2001 – 2004 is “Buiten de Muren” een van de genoemde
beeldende kunstprojecten. Dit project is er op gericht door middel van een
beeldende kunstopdracht een plek of meerdere plekken in de openbare ruimte in
Delft op een manifeste wijze zichtbaar te maken. Het project Buiten de Muren vindt tweejaarlijks
plaats en zal vier keer door een andere kunstenaar worden ingevuld.
Communicatie en interactie met het publiek is een belangrijk onderdeel van
“Buiten de Muren” om de discussie over de openbare ruimte in Delft te verlevendigen. De ene periode wordt een
Delftse kunstenaar geselecteerd, de andere periode een kunstenaar van buiten
Delft. De gemeente benadert kunstenaars om hiervoor een voorstel te doen en de
Adviescommissie Beeldende Kunst adviseert over de ingediende
projectvoorstellen.
Het
doel van Buiten de Muren is dat er na deze vier projecten bijzondere visies
over de stad Delft zijn weergegeven, waar veel bezoekers kennis van konden
nemen. Eventueel vindt er na deze vier projecten een gezamenlijke presentatie
plaats.
Hiervoor is conform
besluitvorming € 36.000,- per project beschikbaar uit de subsidie Beeldende
Kunst.
2. Eerdere editie, Delft =
Here van Coen de Jong
De eerste editie van “Buiten
de Muren” is uitgevoerd door de Delftse kunstenaar Coen de Jong, onder de titel
“Delft = Here”. In 2002 heeft de Delftse kunstenaar Coen de Jong deze opdracht
aanvaard. Hij heeft “Delft = Here” ontwikkeld, waarbij hij een relatie heeft
gelegd tussen vier plaatsen in de wereld met de naam Delft (in Sri Lanka,
Zuid-Afrika, de Verenigde Staten en Nederland). De multimedia-installatie is in
het voorjaar van 2003 tentoongesteld in museum het Prinsenhof in Delft.
3. Ni Haifeng, Of the Arrival and the Departure
Voor
2004 heeft de Adviescommissie Beeldende Kunst gekozen voor het voorstel van de Chinese kunstenaar Ni
Haifeng.
De
in Nederland woonachtige Ni Haifeng stelt voor op een centrale locatie
(bijvoorbeeld de Markt) in Delft dagelijkse voorwerpen van Delftenaren te verzamelen.
Mensen kunnen hiervoor een object aanleveren, die in een container wordt
gestopt. Deze container met spullen zal worden verscheept naar China, naar de
plaats Jing De Zhing. In deze plaats staat een aantal porseleinfabrieken. De
Delftse objecten zullen in China worden gegoten in porselein en daarna weer
terug gaan naar Delft. Deze reis wordt door de kunstenaar vastgelegd op foto en
video. De tentoonstelling in Delft zal bestaan uit alle objecten in porcelein
en het reisverslag van de voorwerpen van Delftenaren naar China. Er zal
uitgebreid aandacht besteed worden aan de communicatie van dit project. Op een
speciale website is de reis “live” te volgen. Het complete voorstel is als
bijlage toegevoegd.
De
projectleiding is in handen van het vakteam CKE, dat verantwoordelijk is voor
de realisatie van het plan.
Korte
planning:
Najaar
2004: verzamelen objecten en verschepen naar China
Februari
2005: terugkomst objecten in Delft
Voorjaar
2005: Tentoonstelling in Delft (Legermuseum, Prinsenhof en / of op een boot)
van de objecten, foto’s en videowerk.
Ni Haifeng (1964, Zhousan, China) maakt werk dat een
bijdrage levert aan het interculturele debat. Ni Haifeng maakt met name
ruimtelijke (video)installaties en fotografisch werk. Hij richt zich op taal en
geschiedenis en hoe bepalend dit is voor de mens. Concreet vertaalt hij dit
ondermeer naar foto’s van zijn eigen lichaam dat is beschreven met teksten over
de exportgeschiedenis van Chinees porselein of met teksten over koloniale
oorlogen waarin China werd verstrikt. Hij stelt zijn eigen identiteit als
Chinees in het Westen aan de orde aan de hand van de historische (koloniale)
verhouding tussen Oost en West. Zijn werk is eerder in Nederland onder andere
geëxposeerd in het Haags Gemeentemuseum, Museum Boymans van Beuningen,
Rotterdam en Museum Het Domein in Sittard. Daarnaast heeft hij meerdere prijzen
gewonnen en exposeert hij regelmatig in het buitenland
Aan
u wordt voorgesteld:
Jorien Kaper
When asked to make a proposal for the project Beyond
the Wall, I immediately thought that I would extensively research into the
history of Delft and do something with it. After I visited the city several
times and did a brief research, I shifted my focus. Delft is a very beautiful
city with a rich history that has never really gone away from its cultural
landscape of the present day. The history is very present, in the streets of
the old town, in the pervasive historical sites and in its everyday life. Thus,
I thought it would be better to leave those characteristics of the city as a
context and not to pretend to know so well of the history of Delft, and do
something with what is beyond, something that I know better. As a
Chinese migrant living in the Netherlands, naturally, I am interested in the
relationship it had and perhaps still has with China, and in bringing
‘otherness’ into the already heterogeneous society of Delft. Delft is renowned
for its Royal Delft Blue Ware, while in China there is a town known for its
porcelain ware, Jing De Zhing, the City of Porcelain as it is called, whose
products constituted the better part of the VOC’s import of Chinese porcelain
ware, in the17th and 18th centuries. Delft Blue is
omnipresent in Delft, so much so that it has become a cliché, so is porcelain
that has become a platitude in the national representation of China’s cultural
heritage. From this line of thoughts, I deem it interesting to add a few
‘strange earthen ware’ to the platitudinous ‘landscape of blue’.
My project will start with collecting everyday
objects in Delft, objects that in someway reflect the life and characteristics
of the city. It is not unlike gathering ethnological evidences of the Delft
population, a practice that is widely employed in anthropology to chart the
unknown territories of ‘the other’, only here, the anthropological gaze is
reversed and redirected at ‘us’- the West.
I will then remake those collected objects into
earthenware with porcelain or Delft Blue motifs on, in the above mentioned
Chinese porcelain town, Jing De Zhing. Those objects should be different, both
in shape or function, from either porcelain or Delft Blue products, so that
when remodeled into porcelain ware they appear strange and useless.
Subsequently, the remodeled strange earthenware will be imported back to Delft
through an international shipping company. The objects collected in Delft will
first be sent to China and then be transformed and sent back to Delft, the
process of which is reminiscent of the porcelain trade, the practice of Chine
de Commande and VOC economic-politics of the old days.
The above-mentioned process will be documented
by a video recording and I will then edit the video material into two separate
video streams that will later be shown beside each other. One video will be the
main chronological narrative of the process and the other will function as an
alternative narrative that provides a comparative reading of the main story
line. The alternative narrative will appear as non-chronological and in a quick
cut mode, in which the sequence will alternate between scenes of cruising along
China’s southern coastal areas where VOC fleets once moored, scenes of moving
through the aforementioned porcelain city, and the land and the water routes of
the historical VOC trade within the ‘middle kingdom’. Re-navigating, it might
be called, through the ‘once navigated territory of the unknown’. Thus both
narratives are combined to function as a dual temporality of a contemporary
tale of two places and guide the viewers navigating through the time-space of
both the present and the historical.
These, however, remain the details to be worked
out after gathering all necessary video footage.
As though to reconstruct a historical moment as
a contemporary fiction or to historicize contemporary life as a
phantasmagorical reappearance of the past, both the videos and the objects will
be staged for the public on a boat docked on the canal between the old VOC
house and Leger Museum, both of which have profound and complex historical
significances. The boat and the location are themselves metaphors that can
create, in viewers, a mantel space for contemplation and imagination. So, one
day, a viewer sees a boat strangely appeared in the heart of the city, as if
the old seaport (Delfshaven) has been restored to unload the newly arrived
‘foreign goods’. He/she has to enter the boat in order to see the goods and
hear the tale of the two places, and he/she might find the objects familiar yet
un-definable, only after seeing the video, will he/she realize that the objects
are after all originated in Delft.
The boat should be a moderately big one, or a
bit strange type that to some extend contradicts the peaceful landscape of
Delft. It is ideal to have several compartments in the hull of the boat.
In one compartment, the porcelain objects will
be presented among the original packing crates, perhaps many of them, as if
‘goods in bulk’ have just arrived.
I will construct another compartment, if there
is any, into an obscure empty space with only the sound of the sea and storm
faintly audible through a loudspeakers system. Ideally the space should be
constructed in such a way that it resembles the interior of a boat from the old
time.
Two monitors will be installed side by side in
the cockpit, against the windscreen, among the steering wheel and other
navigation devices, and the above-mentioned videos will be displayed therein.
So, while being in the cockpit, looking at the landscape through the windscreen
and the videos in front of them, the viewers will be navigating, literally as
well as metaphorically.
(This is yet again a detail to be worked out in
the process. The presentation can vary depending on conditions such as whether
we can find a boat and the type of boat, and whether the authority will permit
docking in this specific location.
It is also possible to present the objects on
several small boats in the open air, so that the viewers can see them from a
distance without having to aboard the boats.)
So, the project consists of multiple
components: the process, the objects, the videos, the boat and the location,
which are all subtly interwoven into a whole, and it appropriates the city and
its history as a ready-made to elicit public imagination. As the work is merged
into the heart of the city, the process of viewing the work can be equated to
that of reviewing the city and navigating the beyond to navigating the
history of Delft. By bringing the “foreign goods” for a second time as the
reoccurrence of a historical event, I want to register the complexity of the
historicity within the present moment. That is to say that the past has never
departed and the history will always be a contemporary re-writing.
Since the project is hinges on the dialectic of
import and export, which is still, I believe, constituting the
contemporary narrative of cultural-economic domination and survival and hence
of the power structure of the global era, what is Buiten de Muren is
effectively remixed into Delft and Delft is reloaded onto the globe. Delft is
thus made wall-less, or perhaps, Delft has never had a wall. Delft, is
after all, like the ‘good old Europe’, a part of the world that is constantly
changing.