The last 15 years mainly in the form of relating to the psychological, social, political historical context of the concept of Memory, Pashat in Russian. De Rooze looks for empty landscapes where terrible things have (or have not) taken place, but where no trace of them can be seen anymore. The Landscape is Empty. A Leer Landschaft is always innocent. As a curator, René de Rooze has several times organized exhibitions that had memory and identity as their underlying guiding principles.
Last year in February, I was visiting our partner Frise in Hamburg with a group of Groningen artists from studio and artist organization Havik. We exchange (among other things) residencies. They are based in a former hairdressing school and have worldwide contacts, especially with art halls, museums and artists' organizations in port cities such as Helsinki, Yokohama, Shanghai and San Diego. I met two Russian sociologists and urban planners there, affiliated with the Russian organization Arts4City: sociologists, architects and environmental designers. They initiate community art projects in St. Petersburg, together with (among others) artists. My interest was piqued.
I know Russia as the heir to suprematism and other abstract styles and movements, which, as avant-garde art from the early twentieth century, have been decisive for my own visual development. Early on I came into contact with El Lissitzky, Malevich, Kandinsky and many others. And Russian literature slid into my head, not only the classics, but also Daniel Charms and Velimir Chlebnikov. In preparation for a possible project and as a kind of pilgrimage, I drove in wild action to Vitebsk, in Belarus. There Chagall had founded an academy, where Lissitzky and Malevich came to teach, and where suprematism had emerged. My visa was only valid for ten days, which forced me to travel on to St. Petersburg and Moscow. To get there, I drove to Tallin, Estonia, and left my car safely in the parking lot of my hotel and traveled on by bus, train and plane. In St. Petersburg, I sought contact with the staff of Arts4City and slowly ideas for a project emerged there.
The Red Triangle is an abandoned factory site just outside the center of St. Petersburg. In 1860 Germans started a rubber factory there. It later passed into British-American hands and was nationalized in 1917. It was the largest rubber factory in Europe and America until after World War II. A major customer was the war industry: even tanks could not do without rubber. After the siege of Leningrad production was resumed, but the need for natural rubber declined when synthetic rubber was invented. In 1991 the factory closed. Artists, musicians, designers and other small businesses, many of them shady, took possession of the site. A veritable cement factory exists there and you can see a lot of punks and illegals from the former Asian Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. They work in Russia without residence permits so it was almost impossible to approach them. With the artists, however, I was able to make contact.
Most of the buildings are in a deplorable state and some are in danger of collapsing. The Petersburg city government has declared the area a monument, but there is no money for maintenance and no political will. The creative industry and related development projects are not done in Petersburg. People would rather see megalomaniac projects like the 400-meter-high Ochta Center and, of course, a new stadium for some world championship.
I decided to do a project there in St. Petersburg involving memory and personal stories. Three similar habits inspired me:
- The custom of sliding messages written on paper to G'd* between the stones of the wailing wall in Jerusalem.
- The custom in Russia as an adolescent (girls especially) to reveal your deep souls to a piece of paper, put it in a bottle, bury it and dig it up again 20 years later, to see what your feelings, expectations, problems, in short souls were.
- The custom in the Soviet Union of the 1960s to have children write an epistle about how they saw the future of their Soviet sanctuary in 50 years, addressed to children who would then, 50 years later, be the same age as they are now. I wanted to work with the participants to write small pieces of paper, on which they wrote their memories of the site, but also their feelings and wishes about the Red Triangle, and put those pieces of paper in a slot of the wall, or in a pre-drilled hole. This was sealed with contact adhesive, to which a small plastic glitter diamond in the shape of a diamond, heart or star was glued. This created colorful dots of light on the old beat-up and dilapidated wall.
To get this far, I had to overcome many small and large obstacles. I had to adapt to the Russian way of organizing and planning, where everything coincides or doesn't work at the last minute. Because I once lived in the Middle East and experienced the necessary chaos there, I was able to regulate my Dutch annoyance. The people in the organization were extremely nice, but at any moment an appointment made could be undone and rescheduled. Until the time of the actual execution of my project, I was not sure if it would all go through. But not to worry, on the other hand I also found it a challenge. The beginning has been carried out and the intention is that it will continue as a work in progress even without my presence with Art4City until the entire wall is littered with colorful diamonds.
I stayed in the artist-in-residence complex Pushkinskaya 10. That complex has a long, dissident, history. Before the building complex moved in in 1991, this movement consisted of artists, musicians and writers who published, gave concerts and made exhibitions underground. The artists were not accepted by the socialist salvation state. An unofficial museum was created, a "nonmuseum" Samizdat (Russian for "self-publishing"), where all objects, texts, et cetera were preserved. After the stifling period under Brezhnev, a certain degree of freedom arose under Gorbachev. In 1991, the Pushkinskaya 10 complex was 'squatted' and converted into an artists' complex. There is still a part of it left, after gentrification, where studios, music studios, stages and places for visiting artists were created. The spaces are small, but if you're doing theoretical research, or setting up a community-art project, that's enough. The atmosphere was communicative. The manager, Anastasia Patsey, invited us to conferences, exhibition openings, and cultural meetings such as one organized by the Dutch consulate (at the Manege Museum and the Dutch consul's official residence on the Neve). I also found myself in a Norwegian art project organized by Pushkinskaya10 and the Norwegian consulate and a lecture with exhibition on the siege of Leningrad, interpreted and imagined by artists at the Paul and Peter Fortress Pro Arte gallery.
The art scene in St. Petersburg is, in my personal opinion, somewhat conservative and fragmented. I experienced this in conversations. People sit on islands, are not very innovative and rely on the past. Artists who can, or who have the courage, leave for Moscow or abroad. There are two art academies in St. Petersburg, one traditional and one less traditional. A good gallery is Anna Nova. Other interesting places I saw are the Manege Gallery, Erarta (a private Museum) and Pro Art. By the way, I was not able to spend a lot of time visiting galleries.
If you have good ideas of your own, you can try to do a project with Arts4City. The abandoned factory site Kivorsky Zavod also has wonderful possibilities. When I looked there, an old dream from twenty years ago resurfaced: a choreography of 100 dancers, 100 bathtubs and 100 shower heads on an abandoned factory site of 100 x 50 meters in the former GDR: alienation, abandonment and purification of history through water.
I concluded the four-week stay in St. Petersburg with four days in Moscow. There I visited friends. The Faculty of Letters at Moscow State University, Department of Dutch and Flemish Literature and Literary Studies, had invited me to give a lecture on a contemporary Dutch artist. Given my fondness for Armando, I spent an hour and fifteen minutes talking about his work, in Dutch. I received positive reactions and gained a nice experience. Incidentally, I sometimes had warm déja-vue feelings in that old Soviet building, because I lived in East Berlin for a while in the nineties and also taught in Soviet buildings like that.
My stay in Petersburg tastes like a repeat. Part of my stay was paid for by the Gerbrandy Fund, and by private sponsors. The Mondriaan Fund rejected my application. I asked several times, but until now no motivation came. At an information meeting in Groningen in the spring of this year, politically correct arguments, such as gender or origin, were mainly mentioned for granting subsidies. After thirty years of professional practice as an artist, I have learned to always follow my own path intuitively and consciously. That has prevented me from conforming to fashionable movements and so far that has worked out well.
* G'd is a religious mode, used by Orhtodox Jews to write God, pronouncing his name and writing is forbidden to them, because bill writing is such a religious custom at the wailing wall I have adopted the spelling.
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