Voids x The Locus w/ Jonathan Castro (2024), Marken, NL @ LYL Radio, FR Jonathan Castro invited me at his show ‘The Locus’ at LYL Radio for an hour of field recordings and in situ readings. We collaborated by thinking about traces, emptiness, cracks, dirtiness, and porosities but mainly by delving into time as a crucial factor to counteract urban development’s predictable and almost anti-urban processes. Through multiple ways of documentation, we explored how the act of recording and framing can influence an urban memory and its potential future. For this show, we searched for the edges of Marken, a Dutch peninsula and major tourist attraction in Noord-Holland. https://lyl.live/episode/the-locus-6

‘Ceremony’ started as a project aiming to cultivate cross-disciplinary knowledge-sharing and speculation on new possibilities, coming together for a collective moment of experience through cinema. Including talks, workshops, collective readings, and experimentations focusing on the scenography and projection of moving images in different situations and contexts. Through ritual and scenography, we collectively question the context of the moving image to its locality and surroundings. Scenogrpahy becomes a site of imaginative exchange, extending the cinematic landscape beyond the screen into the situation.

For the last week of Summer, we organized the screening and ritual of August in the Water — 水の中の八月(1995), a film by Gakuryū Ishii, formerly known as Sogo Ishii. The gathering was accompanied with drinks by Sankrit Kulmanochawong – invitation by Theetat Thunkijjanukij.

This thesis explores the values of ‘gaps’ in the urban fabric of Amsterdam: demolished buildings that leave a temporary residual space behind. It investigates how these spaces, which are often overlooked in traditional urban planning approaches, can be valued beyond economic and commercial gain and how they relate to the city’s collective memory. Using the life cycle of a tree as a metaphor and active agent in urban development, the research documents various stages in time, its power dynamics and interests of a specific gap in Amsterdam-West. But who holds power over which values should be preserved or not? And what does that mean for the development of the city? Rather than striving to choose one ‘right’ value or a singular solution for this gap, the aim is to embrace the complexity of the in-betweenness as a possibility to counteract.

Portraits of Mingling is the result of six months of artistic research and spatial interventions carried out on playground Henrick de Keyserplein in Amsterdam-Zuid. Commissioned by the Municipality of Amsterdam, artists Mayomi Basnayaka, Ilya Lindhout and Paulina Martínez Marín intervened in the daily routines of the square in various ways. They used methods drawn from the arts, architecture, urbanism, heritage, community psychology and embodiment to exchange knowledge. Their results reveal multifaceted portraits of the square, which has been translated into five lessons, and advice to reinforce the social structure at the square, addressed to the Municipality in a publication.

Published in 2024 Perpetual Stew, Sandberg Instituut Graduation Publication, text by Isabelle Sully

Amsterdam is rapidly changing into a polished, controlled and designed landscape. Spaces for surprising, unplanned or unexpected elements are becoming more scarce. Plots in the city that may still hold this potential do not fit within the dominant script of an ‘attractive’ environment, often referred to as ‘negative spots’, ‘wastelands’ or ‘residues’. Hidden by its owners to keep possible trespassers out, fences, security, facades, blockades, workmen or cameras are carefully placed around them.

By placing herself in these spaces and photographically documenting her intrusion, Ilya Lindhout turns the negative notion of these hidden plots into a positive projection of the in-betweenness of public-private spaces, time, and urban development. Through collecting, documenting and arranging the soon-to-be-gone plots in the city, “Voids” opens up space for different narrations, exploring how recording and framing can influence an urban memory and its possible future. In this sense, Ilya Lindhout’s archiving is not only a historical documentation but an act of resistance.

Ceremony started as a project aiming to cultivate cross-disciplinary knowledge-sharing and speculation on new possibilities, coming together for a collective moment of experience through cinema. It includes talks, workshops, collective readings, and experimentations focusing on the scenography and projection of moving images in different situations and contexts. Participants work together to collectively hold a moment of screening that will potentially happen outside, depending on the development of the context made through the workshop.

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The Clean Brothers Wasserette has been providing its service as a coin-laundry to the Jordaan for more than thirty years, up until now. In a time where each household is expected to be equipped with its own washing machine and dryer, such laundrettes appear as a thing of the past. Nevertheless they are part of a long history: from washing side by side at rivers to sheltered washing places to the big public washhouses in the cities of the industrial age. Throughout history, washing has been a communal activity, primarily carried out by women. The spaces where people would gather to wash thus also informed the communities around it—the exchange of information and the cultivation of connections was an intrinsic part of this ritual.

By encountering the space as an oral and embodied archive, Mayomi Basnayaka, Ilya Lindhout and Paulina Martínez Marín mirrored the knowledge that has been passed on from woman to woman while doing the laundry over the years. Through a layered two—day performance, they shed light on the economy of domestic labour, care and address the intersections between private and public. A resulting publication documents their research and conversations with Annie, the last woman working at the laundromat.