Performance and intervention
May 2007
“SYB is getting better in Beetsterzwaag”. Kunsthuis SYB is a platform for contemporary art located in the small, sleepy village of Beetsterzwaag in Friesland. Myself and Bani Bannwart established a fictitious development company with big plans for an enormous new art museum in the village. The point was to pose some questions about the public’s automatic acceptance of what is done with their environment, and where this may lead.
This was not going to be effective unless it was done convincingly. We produced slick 3D visuals of the proposed development, erected signs, distributed flyers, placed adverts in the media, organised a public meeting, and launched a website. All of this was done in the most businesslike manner possible, but all the same just a little “over the top”. Would people get the joke?
Perhaps the most striking thing was that people appeared to accept what we were doing without batting an eyelid. “Jullie gaan ons daglicht wegnemen!” (you people are going to take away our daylight!) complained the small children of our next door neighbours. How much does it take before people see that they are being had?
We hope to establish similar projects in the future, through our company NeuBuilt.
More information at the NeuBuilt website
A report over this and other projects produced as part of The Expanding Pie (in Dutch) can be found here.