Urbanautica

BART LUNENBURG. THIS CREAKING FLOOR AND ALL CEILINGS BELOW

by Steve Bisson

«When I see construction projects going on I get really curious about what happened before on that place. Buildings often have had different functions before. Modern apartment blocks are often build upon grounds where former buildings had to be demolished. I find it interesting to consider that buildings are also often concealing something else. These are the moments that I start wondering about not only what is behind a facade, but also what is ‘underneath the foundations’. I find it really interesting to approach a building like a document that can tell certain stories.»

Recently you were assigned by FOTODOK to research archival materials from The Archives of Utrecht to learn more about the multi-layered history of the site where the same institute is located, and old monastery. Could you tell us about your studies and your main research outcomes?

Bart Lunenburg (BL): From the start, FOTODOK was very open about the outcome of the assignment. When we started off, what we knew for sure was that my research was related to the theme of the then upcoming exhibition Joint Memory: Photographic Fragments (FOTODOK, 2019). This exhibition was investigating how the collective memory is formed through photography. My research dealt with the ‘memory’ of Lange Nieuwstraat 7 itself, the building wherein the exhibition spaces of FOTODOK and Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons are housed.

When I started my research, I was very fascinated by the architecture of the site itself, which to me feels monumental, but in a way also quite strange. When visiting FOTODOK I could feel that the building has a rich history, but I couldn’t really get a grip on things that happened in the building before it turned into a cultural institute. I decided to dive into the available archival materials from the local city archives. I stumbled upon a photograph from the ’70s that showed the exact same building, but then almost twice as large as the building we know today. During my research, I found out that the building used to house a Roman-Catholic primary school for children with learning difficulties and that the two top layers of the school were torn down when the school closed in 1975.

© Het Utrechts Archief, View on the facade of the abandonned primary L.O.M.-School, 1975

© Bart Lunenburg, Shadow Piece, 2020

I still find this photograph very striking, because it confronts you as a viewer with ‘a hole in time’. The photograph functions as some sort of mediator. To me, it revealed the memory of the building itself. It turned out that this photographic image is one of the few images that survived or remained of the almost 90 years that this school existed.

© Bart Lunenburg, Blind Door 1970's, 2020

Few fragments of the building's past remained, most of them from the time period around 1888 when the school was built and from around 1975 when it was partly torn down again. There was, for example, no documentation of the building’s interior, the classrooms, staircases, or of the classes that took place. The image became the starting point of a long and fertile research that became the basis for my exhibition This Creaking Floor and All the Ceilings Below, in which photography, moving image, sculpture and installation overlap into one large exhibition about the building’s history.

This process led to the exhibition This Creaking Floor and All the Ceilings Below currently on show at FOTODOK and Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons as part of the exhibition program Common Grounds: Story / Heritage. Which are the main choices of the show and what can you tell us about your relationship with the curator?

BL: First of all, I want to emphasize that this This Creaking Floor and All the Ceilings Below couldn’t have taken its current form without the very open-minded attitude of the organisation of FOTODOK and especially their curators Daria Tuminas and Lisanne van Happen. I would really like to thank them for the trust they have put in me as an artist, and their patience in letting me gradually develop this project, that along the way kept on growing and growing and turned into one large immersive installation that unfolds itself throughout the entire building.

At a certain point, we had to decide what the best presentation form for the research and new works would be. Since my research dealt with the memory of the building itself and is very site-specific, it made much sense to use the whole building as a framework for the work. This Creaking Floor and All the Ceilings Below plays and investigates the meaning and role of the building’s materials particularly. My installations take a closer look at how it’s windows, doors, floors, walls, ceilings, and stairs behave. It is about the ideals and ideas that are slumbering behind its construction drawings and blueprints. And also about how architecture reacts to the ‘zeitgeist’ of different times, and thereby tells us something about the shifting ideals behind this building. With all the different renovations, the building is already a collage or assemblage in itself. Therefore, the works I have made for This Creaking Floor and All the Ceilings Below are very much intertwined with the already existing architecture of the building. Normally, both FOTODOK as well as Casco Art Institute only do group-exhibitions, so this project is quite unique in its approach. It unfolds over several chapters each with an artist as the central narrator, joined by several other storytellers who speak about this building. For this project I owe a lot to the open-minded attitude of both of these cultural institutions, which gave me all the freedom to create this very large production.

The same exhibition is conceived as a follow up on the subject of collective memory that is currently in the spotlight of FOTODOK and as the first Chapter within Common Grounds: Story / Heritage, co- produced by Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons and FOTODOK. It's an interesting relationship that in-between collective memory and space, which is also a recurring theme in your work. I am thinking about the body of work A Building's Memory. Can you introduce it to us a bit more?

BL: A Building’s Memory started out as a research project, and finally led to the creation of a series of autonomous works. The project investigates the construction and demolishment of houses, buildings, and cities and tries to reveal the architectural ‘memory’ of certain places. While developing this project, I started to get in contact with various curators and institutions that were interested in this approach. It turned out that A Building’s Memory lends itself perfectly to be embedded into specific locations, to immerse itself in different buildings and be executed in various exhibitions. In the last couple of years, the project became a method for thinking, researching and creating new work. This, for example, led to Living Frontiers (2019), an artwork in public space, Penumbra (2019) a site-specific installation on the history of a disappeared coach house in Arnhem, and of course This Creaking Floor and All the Ceilings Below (2020).

By this method of working I try to make the invisible memory of places visible. When I see construction projects going on I get really curious about what happened before on that place. Buildings often have had different functions before. Modern apartment blocks are often build upon grounds where former buildings had to be demolished. I find it interesting to consider that buildings are also often concealing something else. These are the moments that I start wondering about not only what is behind a facade, but also what is ‘underneath the foundations’. I find it really interesting to approach a building like a document that can tell certain stories. However, a lot of information gets lost over the years.

© Bart Lunenburg, This Creaking Floor and All the Ceilings Below, Room without ceiling

In the spaces I work in, I am always trying to find traces that can indicate alterations or interventions in the space. Through the creation of my work, I try to speculate and interpret the history of these spaces. I think I am trying to find an empirical way of learning about changing ideals about building and designing spaces. In a certain way, every building or house is a monument in itself, since it deals with the passing of time. People move out, move on, get older and pass away, but a lot of buildings remain. After a hundred years most people won’t be able to read their original meaning or ideas of the time they were built in, and that is when connotations or signs get lost. In my work I am trying to re-interpret these.

With this in mind I want to give an example of a work from This Creaking Floor and All the Ceilings Below.
In similar ways as we now take measures to prevent the spreading of the COVID-19 virus, architects in the 19th-century came up with solutions to prevent the spreading of epidemical diseases in the overcrowded city centres. The fear of these diseases led to the creation of the large rectangular windows in the building in which FOTODOK and Casco Art Institute are housed. These windows were designed to provide as much light as possible (to kill bacteria) and guaranteed a constant circulation of fresh air throughout the classrooms. Facts like this led to the creation of the installation Room with windows (1888-2020). I find it very fascinating that these seeing these windows and the light falling through is almost an aesthetic experience in itself, but I differs quite from their original function when they were designed. These were times where there was an almost obsessive strive to hygiene and buildings had to meet many government requirements. In the exhibition, Room with windows is a darkened staircase and corridor wherein the windows are literally the light in the darkness of the space, guiding the visitors through this darkness.

© Bart Lunenburg, The Healer, 2020

© Bart Lunenburg, This Creaking Floor and All the Ceilings Below, Room with windows, FOTODOK, Utrecht

I am thinking about your project Living Frontiers that was commissioned to you by the Province of Utrecht (in collaboration with QKunst, Gemeente Bunnik, Waterliniemuseum Fort bij Vechten and Bureau Buiten). What are the main assumption within this work and how you are envisioning it?

BL: Another project I have worked on in 2019 is Living Frontiers, an artwork in the public domain near the city of Utrecht. In the work, I took a similar approach as in This Creaking Floor and All the Ceilings Below, but in this case, the work revolves around the memory of the landscape surrounding the tunnel on which the artwork is situated.

In the assignment for the artwork, I was asked to work with the historical military front lines of the Roman Lower-Germanic Limes (Northern border of the Roman Empire) and the Nieuwe Hollandsche Waterlinie (a 19th-century military infrastructure of almost 100km long that consisting of dozens of forts and thousands of group shelters/bunkers). I wanted to work with the architectural remains of both front lines. Because of this it was quite challenging to make something visible what is mostly invisible, hidden and overgrown in the landscape.

© Bart Lunenburg, view of the installative art work Living Frontiers

In the case of the Roman Limes, I took depictions and representations of the empire line from ancient times, for example from Trajan’s Column, (Rome, 107-112) as the starting point for the creation of scale models. This led to the creation of a built and photographed landscape in which wooden towers are rising from the ground, reminiscent of the many towers that once used to mark the border of empire and guaranteed safe river traffic over the Rhine. The wooden towers have disappeared from the landscape, but with Living Frontiers I wanted to represent this former (architectural) memory of the landscape surrounding the tunnel.

The same goes for the other side of the tunnel for which I have lifted the overgrown, concrete bunkers out of the landscape, abstracted them to then place them back again in this same landscape. The work shows these photographed scale models placed into a constructed landscape by the hands of unknown figures. In the work, that seems playful and in which different scales overlap, I wanted to play with the re-arrangment of these thousands of bunkers that from aerial pictures sometimes literally look like an emptied block box.

© Bart Lunenburg, view of the installative art work Living Frontiers

The playful constructed landscapes with scale models are on the one hand a visual reminder of human effort and activity in the area but, at the same time also comment on these military infrastructures. For example, The Nieuwe Hollandsche Waterlinie was the most expensive infrastructural project that the Dutch government has ever funded, but it (fortunately) never came into use. Both front lines imply ‘a threat’ relative to ‘the other’, but what are these structures protecting us from? Who is this other?

You are a multimedia artist, playing with different mediums yet highly focused on the active interaction with/through space. What is pretty catching of your projects is the architectural dimension activated via maquette and a sculptural approach. I am wondering within your "site-specific" attitude how much dialogue is needed each time with experts and other backgrounds. How you relate with other researchers in the "building process" of your artwork?

BL: In my practice I draw a lot of inspiration from architecture history, building history research and heritage studies. My research consists of a lot of reading, examining archival materials and sometimes this leads to the involvement of an archivist or historian in my working process. When making site-specific work I notice that I sometimes want to stay close to the sources of the places I am working with. When working on a specific location I have the feeling that I want to respect the history and memory of these places. A lot of my works are specifically made for the location that they are exhibited in, and I think they have a lot more impact when they enter into an active dialogue with these sites. My work tries to immersive itself in the characteristics of a place, to intertwine the artwork with the architectural site.

But at the end of the day, I am not a historian or scientist. Of course, I draw a lot of inspiration from these fields of architecture and heritage, but my role within these fields is that of a visual artist. For me, very small given facts or unnoticed or forgotten details about a building can be the starting point of a whole new series of work. I think for me as an artist it is more important to give shape to the poetry of human spaces, the designing of the houses and cities we live in, the building and demolishing of our daily environments. For poetry, a healthy amount of artistic freedom is needed, and that’s maybe where historical research stops and the artistic practice begins.

This Creaking Floor and All the Ceilings Below is about a building that served as a school. The visitors are driven through different rooms were different stories about Dutch history of education are unveiled. What were your basic impressions while discovering some "panoptical" aftertaste of those environments?

BL: In This Creaking Floor and All the Ceilings Below I have tried to approach the whole upper floor of the building as one large scenography in itself. The exhibition compasses five large installations that each tell a story of their own, but the sequence of spaces is also very important in the exhibition. Within the exhibition, I use a wooden sculpture as a narrator through this scenography. Each installation is accompanied by a ‘Counting Hand’ that leads the visitor through the spaces. I derived this ‘counting hand’ from an eponymous tool in the history of Dutch education, that was used for children that had difficulties with their maths. Thanks to the joints in the fingers, they were able to solve simple calculations, as a sort of primitive calculator.

© Bart Lunenburg, This Creaking Floor and All the Ceilings Below, Room without residents

As I already stated before, we wanted the exhibition to unfold throughout the entire building and thereby also exhibit the building itself. For my artistic practice, it was a great challenge and a wonderful experience to think of a series of consecutive spaces. That is also why each installation has a title that specifies it as a specific room in a building: Room without residents (1888-2020), Room with floors (1412-2020), Room with doors (1888-2020), Room with windows (1888-2020), Room without ceiling (1888-1975, 2020).

It is also interesting to consider that this spatial design in the exhibition originates from the original design plans of the school. The installation Room with doors (1888-2020) dives into this design. In the school building, there were no hallways. The former classrooms of the school building were connected through a line of open doors, making each room interlinked and accessible to a clergyman who “sees through” the building and monitors all movements of pupils from one point of view. It was not possible to enter or leave the school unnoticed. Influencing behaviour through the idea of being watched, the architecture of this “hallway- panopticon” is an educational system in itself. It teaches students how to conduct themselves in response to this all-pervading observation.

This specific function of the building is something that fell into oblivion. After the school closed and turned into artist studios and exhibition spaces, the row of open doors got out of use. The doors between the office of Casco Art Institute and a neighboring artist studio got closed and turned into a closet space. In Room with doors (1888-2020) I have re-built the five doorposts, photographed these and turned them into life-size photographic textile prints. In this way, the visitors wander through this panoptical-like labyrinth of doorways.

Can you introduce us to your educational path and how it helped you shape or spur your visual interest?

BL: Between 2013-2017, I have studied and graduated from the Photography department of the University of the Arts Utrecht (HKU). After, but also during my studies, I have always wanted to challenge the boundaries of the photographic medium, but also crossing its borders. My current practice is focussed on a multimedia approach and can take the form of photographic series, sculpture, video, installation, and drawing. In my practice, I am always investigating architecture and scale models are fulfilling a central role in my research projects, and are also the ‘intermediator’ between these different media forms.

However, I think that this background in photography is something that I will always carry with me and that ‘photographic thinking’ is also visible in my more sculptural work. These are often very flat or relief-like or deal with almost photographic perspectives or viewpoints.

During my studies at the HKU, I have also studied Art History for a while at the University of Amsterdam (UvA), since I also have a strong interest in the history of art and architecture and wanted to enrich my practice with more academic knowledge. After two years, I have stopped studying there to enable myself to focus on the development of my artistic career.

I am curious about the type and quality of feedback or follow-ups you had on your work so far, considered you are still a young artist at the early stage of your path? And what are you up with for the future?

In the last couple of years, I have noticed that my work can relate itself to different kinds of fields, such as art, photography, architecture and heritage. I find it very interesting to receive feedback from different points of view. Lately, I also got often got the question if I didn’t actually want to become an architect. Also, some people are surprised that I don’t have an architectural background. I think that this vague area between these fields is exactly the domain that I want to work as an artist, because it enables a lot of opportunities for cross-pollination. Although I don’t want to become an architect, I have the long-term ambition to maybe one day create an architectural ‘folly’ or to make an exhibition design. In the end, I am pretty sure that visual arts will be my main-focus. I always have much appreciation for artists that involve architecture in their work in all kinds of forms.

Currently, we are in quarantine because of the COVID-19 crisis. Unfortunately, this means that This Creaking Floor and All the Ceilings Below is temporarily closed, as well as other upcoming exhibitions and art fairs. However, these times enable me to focus on the creation and production of my first artist book in collaboration with graphic designer Hans Gremmen and writer Taco Hidde Bakker. For this upcoming project, I am approaching the medium of the book as a building in itself. Thereby I am taking the ‘enfilade’ as a conceptual outline for a passage throughout the building that is this book. The ‘enfilade’ is a spatial design form in architecture that is often used in museums and originally was founded in 18th-century French Baroque palace architecture, in which different rooms are interconnected and all the doors are interlinked via one linear axis. A type of spatial design that is also very cleary visible Room with doors (1888-2020), but also pops up in other of my works such as: Doorzonsculptuur (2017) and Marching Walls (2017).

The book takes the same title as the exhibition This Creaking Floor and All the Ceilings Below, since this exhibition will also play a significant role in the book. The book will be published by FW:Books in the Summer of 2020 and soon I will be also launching a crowdfunding campaign.

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LINKS
Bart Lunenburg personal website
FOTODOK Exhibition This Creaking Floor and All the Ceilings Below
Urbanautica The Netherlands

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