. works /
. cv /
. contact /
. press /
Perpetual Stew
Sandberg Instituut Graduation 2023
“Ilya Lindhout”, text by Isabelle Sully, p. 31-32
Studio for Immediate Spaces Ilya Lindhout
Text by Isabelle Sully
There is a gravel road around the corner from where I grew up that has been unsealed for as long as I can remember. It sits on the border between two suburbs, and, therefore, at a standstill between two municipal councils intent on not shouldering the bill. Stuck unclaimed on the periphery, the road’s dysfunctional state reveals what sits at the core of urban and infrastructural development projects: an expense of social relations and shared resources in the face of commercial gain.
Presented in the dark back corner of the Studio for Immediate Spaces Graduation Exhibition space–in that kind of little inside-outside room poised between the main interior and the backyard–Ilya Lindhouts’ work Voids (2023) is composed of series of 35 mm slides projected from a carousel slide projector. Images flash up against a concrete wall, illuminating its details with photographs of vacant pockets of outdoor space in rhythmic intervals. Depicting fenced-off and overgrown empty lots decorated with garish commercial advertisements, the collection of field research around the city of Amsterdam–documented both on camera and in the form of a printed inventory.
Coming from a background in cultural heritage, Lindhout is accustomed to writing biographies of place through archival research. However, in the sector within which she worked, such outcomes were geared toward creating seductive stories for urban developments–a reality that she struggled with. In stark contrast to this past, the present of her work applies this formative period in a freer way, negating the commodification of public space for private means through freezing it on film in a moment of liminality. This practice, as well as Lindhout’s work more broadly speaking, sits in opposition to the streamlining of the city, or to what cultural theorist and curator René Boer deems “smoothening”.1 In this superfast, overdesigned process of city development, the space for friction and self-determination within it is eliminated. As Lindhout told me, “There are no cracks in which to leave your own traces”.
Much like the unsealed road, the empty plots depicted in Voids stand as a symbol of the conflicts between the municipality, the residents, and the real estate developers, and in this way they reveal a crack in this supposedly smooth city. As with art, pausing for a moment to experience something suspended in a supposed lack of function is to resist the presupposition that economic relationships of production and exchange are social relationships that exist among things, and not among people. This is perhaps why a figure can be seen illegally standing int he void in Lindhout’s photographs–after all, the point of this project is to infer that unscripted places can and should be reconfigured in allegiance to the commons. Alongside these human-shaped cracks, every now and then there is a visual pause as an empty slot in the slide carrousel projects only light. A golden hue illuminates the corner of the room: itself an ode to the void, embedded here within the biography of the work.
– Isabelle Sully, 2023
1. René Boer, The Smooth City: Against Urban Perfection, Towards Collective Alternatives (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2023).
. news /