some more thoughts

Surrounded by the red-light district and adjacent to Oude Kerk (“the old church”), Oude Kerk house no. 11 is placed at  the  threshold between worlds: on the one hand, the everyday life of a neighborhood inhabited by tourists, and neighbors; and on the other, the world of contemporary art within a former church, which is as well the oldest building of Amsterdam. Oude Kerk also hosts 10,000 bodily remains in its crypts: a church-cemetery surrounded by streets with red windows where sex is happening and all hours of the day and night. Eros and thanatos in other words. Our ethics and our escapes. So its in-betweenness is not only spatial, it is also temporal; it is also affective; and the pandemic of Covid 19 will also mark a before and after. (Does the reader of this text share a feeling of undefinition, even as the world is now back to “normal”?)

We think of the red door as a liminal space, an intermediate – hopefully  intersectional –  territory between things and events. Arnold Van Gennep , in his book “Rites of Passage,” talks about the liminal as the middle space between the time before and after; a ritual “when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete.”  This intermediate space often generates a sense of ambiguous unease. It also creates freedom – although it shows us the elements of what will be, they lack a structure that defines how they will interact with each other; it seems like a soup of loose words waiting for a grammar structure that provides meaning. Following this logic, and in agreement with Van Gennep, we think of the red door as a space where the elements of our social, political, and cultural context can be decomposed into their constitutive parts under the possibility of being freely recomposed in fundamentally playful ways. We believe that this recomposition is consensual; no game can be played by only one person, every game is language, and every language is community.

What will we do to meet again, in a pandemic world?

It is a tricky question; we are so used to the interaction with the other that we do not realize the elements that constitute this encounter; we are not only voices that respond to each other through a screen: we are chemical substances in the saliva exchanged when we speak; we are sweat, tears, hormones, we are skin to be touched. Probably the first step to answer this question is to recognize our condition of transition, of undefinition, of hope and anguish… That is one of the privileges of a liminal space. This is the precise moment to think about what we have believed to be expected for so many years and that we usually take for granted. 

Although the liminal implies a transition, this will not be possible without also breaking down and understanding the elements that precede it; hence discussions – where as many points of view as possible are integrated – are fundamental. In this sense, we believe this is the right time to resume discussions about contemporary art and its relationship with society; to discuss and problematize these intermediate points between community and artistic tradition, between social art practices and public policies; with education from below provoking the re-learning of a world that is continuously spinning in and out of our grasp.

To answer the question how can we meet again we must accept ourselves without direction and recognize the possibilities of this condition. We must all also accept, in hindsight, that we invoked the trickster, the undoing of these (personal) times; we invited him into a house with a red door and thin walls were sound carried loudly and the borders banged shut around the world and the bells of Oude Kerk rang both welcomes and warnings – then we all ended up quite unexpectedly unraveled by circumstances beyond our control but also of our own making, both, at once, with multiple lessons and insights for all, lessons and insights still mysterious and unfolding.