A hole in a wall

Judith: In 2022, you realized a summer studio at TENT, as an extension of your ongoing studio in Zuidwijk. We worked with you as Kunstlab, but also as collective SOHERE, and saw you operate with different hats on. Can you tell us more about that?

wolf: Kunstlab+Buren was founded in 2017 from a collaboration between SKARlokaal, Ariadne Urlus and our collective SOHERE. SKAR, as an organization that manages workspace for artists in Rotterdam, had the idea to link artists to a school, in order to realize studios that are more embedded in social contexts, as a counterpart to studios that are more inward-looking. SKAR hoped that this would lead to new forms of collaboration, perhaps even a revenue model for artists. We at SOHERE are interested in developing learning environments and 'designing the encounter'. What exactly does it mean when you say, 'one meets the other'? What kind of space does that require? How do you shape it? We were curious about what the connection between a school and a studio can mean. What does the mutual relationship entail, and where is the urgency to develop an encounter? As a first answer to these questions, we started with architectural interventions in our studio.

jip: Then we organized a first summer event for the neighborhood together with Ariadne. Since then, residents have become actively involved and Kunstlab has started to grow. Meryem Yagoub added Kooklab, and Rana Chamseddin Tuinlab in the green area next to the building.

wolf: We call it Kunstlab+Buren to emphasize: What is interwoven with us? That is about our literal neighbors, but the name is of course also a metaphor for locality and the consequences you draw from it.

jip: SOHERE functions as a fluid collective, a movement that relates to people depending on the context. There is no fixed group, although we started with a number of people who are still part of it.

Judith: How does SOHERE organize itself?

wolf: Around issues. One of those issues is situated in Rotterdam-South, where jip and I are active. Another issue was for example connected to School of Commons in Zurich [link to About – SoC (schoolofcommons.org)], where Joseph Baan worked. For Joseph, that offered the context in which he could practice certain ideas about collective learning. He learned from that, brought that in, we learn from that, and so on. Within SOHERE, we are constantly discussing the creation of learning environments, didactics and more, and we learn in relation to each other. The contexts in which we work are organized by the interests of the person involved. So if one person is more interested in adult education and the other more in creating a children's workshop, that becomes the context and the shared knowledge flows there

jip: SOHERE's mentality also works individually. Meryem takes what she learns at Kunstlab with her in her pedagogy studies. Ariadne takes it with her in her involvement in other initiatives in the city. And when I organized the Writers' Island, I passed on ideas from SOHERE to young artists. We are generous; ideas are open for others to use.

wolf: In this way, we are constantly reinventing SOHERE. We have no definition, just as Kunstlab is an organic model, created by all participants. Everyone who participates tells a different story. It is about the individual development that adds to the collective. That collective is therefore always in motion and in a certain way has no form.

Anita: You also recognize this in the idea of ​​'emergent strategies' by Adrienne Maree Brown.(1) That revolves around what you just described: instead of thinking of something in advance and imposing it, you are curious about what can emerge in a specific context.

wolf: Exactly. And we don't want repeatable models to emerge in which things are defined. Or categorized.

jip: At the same time, you do have a strategy, because an 'emergent strategy' is not without obligation. You come up with certain proposals, think about the consequences, you are also critical of the situation that arises and formulate a direction, again and again.

Anita: I find that very valuable, because you have to be present in the moment and look very consciously at what is actually happening.

wolf: You have to be actively present. And be sincere.

jip: That's why we are really very critical: Is it going well, here and now? Is it not going over the heads of the participants?

Anita: You keep evaluating yourself and each other? Evaluating sounds so businesslike but…

wolf: …strategy also sounds very militaristic [laughs]. But that way you also put yourself on the line. And the point is that you are all on the line. Nobody has the answers yet. That is precisely why you end up in a space that has to be shaped by each other, and in doing so you also have to take care of each other. I notice that I also teach at the academy based on those principles. If you do not have all the outlines fixed, you really have to be present and active yourself, and you really have something to lose. That can also go wrong, when you no longer know what to do or become too dominant—all those aspects suddenly come into play. Ultimately, the question is: how do you organize people together in the first place? That is risky and exciting, but that also makes it interesting and extremely creative.

jip: We build bridges and invest in them in a way that goes beyond the 'scarcity mindset' that dominates economic thinking. According to that mindset, you would conclude 'this is what we have and with that I can do this and then I still have a profit'. Instead, we work from a principle of 'a lot'. That is why at Kunstlab you can make as many as you want. So if someone asks 'how many buttons can I make?', the answer is: You can make as many as you want, and you can add them here, take them with you, give them away, and so on. In this way, you move from a completely different starting point.

wolf: We came to the insight that this is about a creative space, and not so much about the studio, because the studio includes connotations in which all kinds of exclusions immediately take place. The idea of ​​the creative space can connect to much more, and is also applicable to the conversation or debate, or to the square, in this case the school or neighborhood square.

Anita: It's also a metaphorical space.

wolf: Yes, so you can go in many more directions with it. The more perspectives we bring in, the more diversity arises, and the more that space will become everyone's. You could say that the space becomes less clear because you are doing so many things at the same time, but on the other hand it does become a space that many more people can connect to, and entrances to participate. In fact, this space offers, at least for me, the only possibility to show work as an artist. I no longer find that other space interesting.

Judith: What other space are you referring to?

wolf: Let's call it 'the white cube', or the museum idea of ​​the exhibition. I find it interesting what the encounter with the public can be without the conditions around it being fixed. You get much further from the everyday or self-evident presence of art. That's what I'm all about. After our temporary extension of Kunstlab at TENT, we therefore thought: this shouldn't be a one-off project, this has to stay here. Not that we necessarily have to do that as SOHERE, but that such a creative space exists. Because that is where conversations and exchange can take place, and therefore also the dialogue with the institute, by constantly raising the question: what is the art institute, and what do we actually want with art and the public? In the Zohier Summer studio that we realised with you, the public could enter with different motivations and prior knowledge. And for everyone it was obvious that you could stay as long as you wanted. Some stayed the whole day. There were people of all ages, adults and children mixed together, who went to work to make things and talk to each other, without necessarily being concerned with us as artists. You could feel that this place in TENT was starting to become a space for everyone, a space that people made together. We are increasingly understanding the conditions that are necessary for that. And that space is becoming more and more open, precisely because we dare to make it more and more outspoken.

jip: That was certainly the case at Kunstlab in TENT. We created a wall here, which you immediately ran into upon entering. As an adult visitor, you had to step aside, and thus literally take a side perspective. As a child, you could go through it, through a hole low to the ground.

wolf: A wall is a powerful image: putting up a wall is political, a hole through it is a kind of fairy tale. This architectural intervention pressed some visitors against the wall, and thus enforced a certain idea of ​​equality.

jip: The relationship between space and your body changed, and that undermined certain things. That wall in TENT came from an idea that arose when we had just opened our studio in Zuidwijk. At that time, we built a corridor through which the children could go from our entrance, straight through the studio, back to the schoolyard during school breaks. Everything changed immediately.

wolf: For everyone: for us, the children and the teachers, because they suddenly lost track of the children. We also played with that idea of ​​overview in TENT. In the art space we are actually always stuck in that idea: there is always someone who is looking, and something or someone who is being looked at. We wanted to break through that.

Anita: Does this also concern your interest in multi-hierarchical working?

wolf: Yes, and about making more perspectives possible. For example, by building a construction in which you can climb up when you are small, so that the child is bigger than the adult. Or by making a tower in which you can close yourself off, but which has a peephole in it so that you can also look outside.

jip: So that you also remain part of the greater whole all the time, and can participate in all sorts of ways in what is happening. Just like we talked about our concept of the collective, of which you can be part individually in different ways.

wolf: That multi-hierarchy is also about simultaneity. Kunstlab at TENT was not a children's studio. At the same time, it was an exhibition in which all kinds of images could be found, but not in the obvious context. The stacking of blocks that I made would be read in a certain way in a museum exhibition about minimalism. Now you came across those blocks in this creative space, and you had to determine your own relationship to them. You rarely find such an undefined situation in the art world. Of course, the space that we created is also a conditioned situation, shaped by specific ideas. But they revolve around the question: in what kind of space do you meet each other, do you get into conversation with each other, do we make things together?

jip: And what kind of polyphony can there be in that? Can it be a collage, in which all sorts of different things happen at the same time and can be seen through each other, because everyone can also add something themselves?

Anita: It is different if you come to view or consume art, or if you come to actively experience and participate. Then the relationship with art is no longer one-sided, it becomes more layered.

Judith: And you actually notice again and again that the visitor also needs that.

jip: But you really have to shape that encounter. There is a lot involved, you are constantly facilitating, but then from a position where you know what it is about. That is not something that you can just let someone do who does not feel and see what is at stake here. So when we invited other artists to contribute to TENT, we asked makers who have worked with Kunstlab more often, understand what we are trying to do and are therefore also experienced in talking about it. They knew that the intention is not for an artist in the creative space to focus on your own work and agenda, but also not to leave participants to their fate. You create circumstances in which you can invite people to make something from a dialogue. In addition to the encounter that arises when artists and audience become makers together, it was also an interesting question at TENT whether a different encounter could arise here between parent and child.

wolf: For example, we enticed the parents to enter into a dialogue with their child through painting, without talking. And when they then both explained why they reacted to certain elements in each other's painting, they observed: we really talk differently, we have found another language.

Judith: That works in your creative space, but the school in Zuidwijk never really embraced you, did it? The connection with the school system remains difficult, while they could benefit so much from it.

wolf: One teacher who liked to come to us saw it and said: 'With abstractions you just understand things much better'. She knew how important drawing is, and individual expression, because that is not just about expression but also about manifesting and communicating ideas.

Judith: And about developing self-confidence, and discovering how you relate to others.

jip: That is why we at Kunstlab find it important that you can be there in all kinds of capacities, in all kinds of roles and mutual relationships. You do not necessarily have to make something, and what you contribute can also be supportive, or very small. Or very big, bigger than yourself. You can also just daydream, because that is also part of the creative space.

Anita: As an artist, you are not continuously creating output in your studio. You also have to develop ways of thinking, and the thing you make is a tool to facilitate that thinking. That is actually what it is about, I think. But material output seems to be higher in the value hierarchy in the art context, much higher than ways of thinking, of being, relating to each other, of being in society. While those are also very important things.

jip: We seek the moments of wonder. That you think—wow, what is this, what am I discovering here? Children often have that very strongly. It is beautiful when they realize that that process can be very joyful.

Anita: The value of this is often underestimated. During my bachelor studies at the art academy it was never about the joy of the process.

Judith: You could extend that to grades in education. Grades are seen as the output of a student, while so many other things can happen at other levels in the development of a child.

jip: I’m currently reading José Esteban Munoz’s writing about queer futures.(2) He calls what we often talk about ‘plural singularity’—the individual has a place in the collective. This means, for example, that when you design a lesson for a group, you don’t ask children to make the same thing on their own, but to make their own things in relation to the others. That almost never happens in art education. Education makes everyone equal, but in doing so it also perpetuates a lot of inequality. For us, how to deal with equality became an important question when we moved Kunstlab to TENT and the city centre. We realised that there could be an imbalance with Kunstlab in Zuidwijk. That’s why we decided to invite our neighbourhood children to help design the space in TENT, and to build constructions they had built in the studio here too and share them with others—like that tower you can retreat to. At the same time, we could never involve all the children in that design phase, so we brought others along over the summer. Involvement could not, and did not have to, be the same for everyone.

During the last weekend in TENT we also organised a round table discussion with the children, to look back and take what we had learned together back to Zuidwijk. For a second round table discussion we asked other initiatives from the city, such as Pluspunt, Women Connected, Queer Gym. Just like us, they work from a constructive activism: you experience what is missing in society, formulate a desire for something different, and you are going to make that.

wolf: Self-organization, where people try to get a grip on their own living environment and give it direction, is necessary to achieve change. And it is important to invite each other to do so, to grow together, to be able to deal with multiple issues, to make connections in the city, against the capitalist system and political pressure. To experience how more types of new models emerge—of being together, working together, making space for new ideas and experiences—and also to feel that you can no longer do without them.

Judith: You work intensively with the children from the neighbourhood in Zuidwijk. Do you notice anything of your approach and ideas in them, do you see them change?

jip: Certainly with some children. Sometimes it is also difficult, and the differences in living conditions are great. But still, sometimes you see something arise that you could call experiencing a form of self-determination, the idea that you can help shape things. Actually, it is not about what we get in return here and now. Maybe it is not happening now either. You create an image, you hope that it will go somewhere, that it has a future, and maybe that does not happen where you are, not even during your lifetime. Because it is bigger than you.