Oct 11th: Coming out day on the Aalmarkt, Leiden

Then Sen took the flag home and it nows flies from our Leiden-north balcony.

Oct 10th: final impressions of our video installation in the Aalmarkt studio

The five videos are:

The Tears of Rangi | Ngā roimata o Rangi,
16 min. 30 sec.

The Moving Heart | Te Ngākau Nekeneke
3min 33 sec, song: Whānau Mārama by Toroa Pohatu, Aotearoa | New Zealand

The Two Lands
16 min 9 sec., voice: Sonja van Kerkhoff

The Dark Valley,
14 min 10 sec

Heart of the Land | Te Ngākau o te whenua
3 min, 33sec

More photos of our new video installation on Oct 9th

                                      

Tama worked on the outer skin of planks and Sen found that dipping the wood into the canal made them flexible enough to stop breaking when bending them for the bow of the boat-house.
Photographs from a few days earlier are here

October update on our installation in an old shop on the Aalmarkt, Leiden

On October 1st Sen started building the front wall and doorway and I started work on the ceiling lights and the illumination for the suspended harakeke and piupiu.

We hope to have all the videos, sounds and lighting in place by Sunday October 10th when we will have an open day for visitors. OPEN: Aalmarkt 17, 2 - 6 p.m.

We are also on the look out for bits of carpet as Sonja will use what carpet she gets from people and the street as a layer underfoot. A layer of the land from this part of the world. Each contributor of carpet will receive a photo later showing how their carpet was incorporated into the sculptural landscape inside this structure.

"The tears of Rangi", the final video (now 16 minute long) is almost finished and I am also working on an 18 min version of the video "Heart of the Land". For the installation the most videos will be much as longer so the sounds, music and voices work more fluidly in the space. View some earlier versions of the videos on my vimeo page.

For earlier photos of this work see September 2010.
 

Update on the new installation at Aalmarkt 17

Walls are almost done. Next more work on the lighting, putting the video screens into place + work on the ceiling drawings.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
To how it looked on September 18-19 >>

The Leiden 2010 Arts Route - Kunstroute Leiden 2010

<< Left: For the annual open artist studios weekend (18 + 19 Sept) we shared our space with painter and musician, Anneke van Rijswijk who hung her drawings and paintings inside the framework of our "kainga".
Alet Kortenoeven, who was the previous occupant of our OPENMAKERS studio had drawings along the walls and a small room where from inside this you could look through funnel-like holes containing objects with the city as a backdrop. And across the window and on the television was the "there is beauty in the city" photo-magnet project. >> Info about the Leiden project

We had about 300 - 400 visitors over the 2 days!
A huge contrast to the 30 or so who visted our exhibition 5 minutes away in the Morstraat Kapsalon. However Sen liked it that he was able to read and be out of the crowds. More about our work in this show is here: www.sonjavank.com/09aderna.htm

About 150 artists showed work in around the city and one place that stood out for me was the COC exhibition. Downstairs was a poem in English and Dutch (see photo on the left) which made a strong visual and metaphysical statement against the mirror wall and upstairs were prints and cartoons by Suzanne van Rossenberg among others. All the work not only celebrated gay and lesbian identity but did it with such wit and magic.

Then on September 20th (see photo on left) Alet took the last of her work out and we had room to pull the "kainga" forward to finish the bow and to work on the curved contour. We worked most days from 2 till 7, while in the evenings and mornings I started or finished new edits for the videos. Premiere Pro is a wonderful programme and I've now discovered the open source Flick DVD is good for creating the dvd side of things.
It still takes a computer about 10 hours to render a video, which I then throw it onto a dvd and then view it the best tv we have to test the quality and then I tweak what is needed and start all over again. See some earlier results here: www.vimeo.com/sonjavank

More work on the "kāinga a roto" (boat-home)

This photo shows that we have now straightened the frames so that they are vertical and started adding permanent braces which curve around the outside.

On Friday (17 September) we put in two tv dvd monitors and had these running to decide on the size of the windows we will build for these on the inside. We've gone for making the two first windows 19 inches. We also had the marante plywood cut which will be 90 planks, each 13 x 240 cm long, placed over and along the outer structure.

At the Gamma it took a man and a machine about half an hour to do all this. This was much faster than the 6 we cut using our bench saw, where all 4 of us held the large sheets.

On September 16th about 6000 Leiden citizens registered at the Waag (medival weighing house, a few metres west of our building) for the annual, free herring and white bread (google "The relief of Leiden of 1574" to find out more about this. This article in Dutch is about this). Many of these spent a good 5-10 minutes standing in the queue outside our window. Typical comments were about how stupid we were building this, because it wouldn't fit through the door. One of the advantages in speaking English to each other while working is that, we don't need to respond as most assumed we couldn't understand them. The other common comment concerned expressions of surprise that a woman as small as I was was handling tools and seemed to know what I was doing :)

The people in the queue were of all ages, but going by their comments and the fact that they didn't seem to notice the numerous images and texts on the windows explaining in Dutch that this was an art project, obviously were people who don't visit art galleries. However we had a number of interesting and friendly conversations with some who did notice that the Leiden shoe-makers shop was now a studio + gallery for the "There is beauty in the city".



More about the there Beauty is in the city exhibition is here