In the black-and-white photography of Awoiska van der Molen, buildings appear to withdraw undisturbed from the speed of everyday existence. They pose as serene and enduring characters, captured by the photographer while at rest. Van der Molen has travelled to various large cities, where she found her images in the sleepy districts on the edge of the city. She mainly worked during the evening or at night. The choice of architecture, the location, the natural lighting, and the nuances in the black-and-white prints make the images suggest a world that appears insusceptible to external influences.
The film ‘On Translation: Transparency/Architecture Acoustique’ by Aleksander Komarov focused on the concept of ‘translation’. The artist filmed the Van Nelle factory in Rotterdam and the new Reichstag in Berlin and makes a connection between the use of transparency in early modernist architecture and the present-day architecture of glass and steel. The film is in three parts. The image remains more or less the same, but the soundtrack evolves from ambient sounds to a sound compilation by Gleb Shutov and an interpretation of the composer Elvira Plenar.
Finbarr McComb and Pieter Sprangers founded the firm Stereo Architects in 2006. An important starting point in their projects is to be guided by the existing urban context. This was also the case in the design they submitted for the Rotterdam ideas competition ‘Burgemeester zoekt woning’ (Mayor seeks residence). Stereo Architects chose a quayside location near the Willemsbrug on Noordereiland. The quay is flanked by two existing brick towers. The design for the mayor’s residence Oude Willem was inspired by the forms and materials of the towers.
Jan Adriaans photographed interiors in which the foreground and background, top and bottom seem to merge together. Every notion of spatiality disappears in the confusing relationship between scale and depth. In the photo series of an office building in Buenos Aires where he stayed, the shell of the building almost becomes flesh. The recent photos of semi-public buildings in Rotterdam show anonymous entrances, rooms and corridors. He regularly introduces a self-applied appendage to the interiors. These are elements – a cushion, a strip of tape, a ribbon of light – that appear as mysterious hints of an absent director.
The architectural firm Monadnock (founded by Job Floris, Sandor Naus and Floris van der Poel) regards the city as a landscape in which the elements change at different rates. Buildings change very slowly and constitute the hardest material, similar to a monadnock, the type of mountain that is left standing in a landscape after a long process of erosion.
For his installations and objects Tonio De Roover used plastic objects and items from everyday life such as Venetian blinds, bags and refrigerator trays. All his objects were once used in a house, an office, a garden or factory. De Roover removed them from their natural habitat, combines them with other objects and (often) adds artificial light. His ensembles have the character of a cinematographic setting. The abandoned attributes tell the story of an unknown scene that took place here previously.