The city is covered with advertising and marketing slogans (Rotterdam Durft, I amsterdam), and is turned into a stage for festivals intended to reinforce its economy or identity. Every square metre is filled with a banner, a logo, a new complex, a restriction, or an urban development programme. With each attempt to make the city more visible, however, it in fact becomes invisible, obscured by the plethora of images and symbols.
Neo-beginners provided a radical counterbalance. It initially appeared to be a typical group exhibition, in which a wide variety of artists, media, and activities promise to offer the visitor dynamic entertainment. And although TENT indeed hosted many events, interventions and performances during the exhibition period, Vanhoe’s presentations challenged predominant ideas on thematic exhibitions. Neo-beginners left TENT’s exhibition space relatively empty in order to begin anew, creating space for new perspectives on the urban condition, changing stories, and new meanings.
In Neo-beginners the works functioned as propositions. The Indonesian artists’ collective Forum Lenteng (Jakarta) stayed in Rotterdam for a month, and related their explorations of the city by means of video reports. A fusion of music and visuals took place in the workshops of LAb[au] (Brussels), through which a new form of 4D architecture was created. Acoustic artist Frans de Waard (Nijmegen), one of the key figures in Dutch experimental electronic music, composed a soundtrack lasting seven hours. The duo BAVO (Rotterdam) set up office in TENT to write the essay ‘Pleidooi voor een oncreatieve stad’ (‘Plea for an uncreative city’). And the video series Under Hypnosis by Matt Mullican (New York), showed the artist in search of a new logic.
In addition to the exhibition an extensive programme of workshops, spontaneous (inter)actions, and screenings took place both inside and outside of TENT. During the festival De Wereld van Witte de With, Taco Stolk stretched the Witte de Withstraat to the end of the city’s limits.