SEGMENT I, 'STORAGE'

During the research period of this project we walked through the city looking for unfamiliar and strange spaces. But like many other cities in the Netherlands it was hard to find such locations. In our concept of the project we focused on the shops and the way the window goods were displayed. All the shop windows display an aesthetic balanced composition of the products they sell. We wanted to create a contrast with our work. We thought of creating a space that almost every shop needs; a storage space. Most of the times these spaces are found in the basement or in attics, hidden from the customers. We liked the idea to display such a place. The storage space was located in the town centre and the view of it was in stark contrast to the other shop windows in the area.

The intervention ‘Storage’ was a strange operation in an organised and picturesque shopping district. The project was created within a disused shop that had been empty for five years. The shop was not in use due to strong city council regulations concerning the state of the building and the possible measures that had to take place because of sanitation caused by the pollution in the ground. Its location in the city centre is known as a touristic and commercial hot spot, close by the ‘Hooglandse church’, and other medieval buildings. Because the space has a big shopwindow, the people in the streets had a good view of the interior of the installation space.

In the beginning we thought the installation was the artwork, but gradually we noticed that the whole process of involvement in this particular neighborhood became the more important aspect of the work. We noticed during the construction period of the installation that a lot of people were looking inside and wondering what it was we were doing. Sometimes they were knocking on the front window asking us for an explanation. “What’s inside of all those boxes”, they shouted. They immediately thought that we were starting a new business and they were very curious about our operation and our products. The performative installation provoked a lot of discussion and activated a new commercial destination of the space in the months after we left. We tend to believe our work had some sort of influence in this. Maybe the people from the city council decided it was better to loosen the string concerning their renovating-policies, rather than keeping a space that could be misused again as a mysterious storage space.