Photo: Cary Markerink
Welcome Stranger – psycho zones in private living, collaboration project with Christiaan Bastiaans, Rob Birza, Maarten de Reus, and Berend Strik
On curatorial interventions – a slide show by Marjolein Schaap.
Marjolein Schaap, founder and curator of Welcome Stranger Foundation will speak about her past and future curatorial projects. Schaap is an art critic and art researcher.
Welcome Stranger projects are situated on the edge of private and public places, art and life, fiction and reality. Although they appear incidentally, on a rare base in fact, these projects had rather an impact. Due to their exceptional conditions, Welcome Stranger projects are especially questioning the set of rules of the art world.
More specifics on these past projects will be highlighted in the lecture. To give a sneak peak, nowadays well known Dutch artists as Rob Birza, Berend Strik and Mark Manders were experimenting in the Welcome Stranger context. Jeanne van Heeswijk had her first try out as urban curator in a Welcome Stranger project.
Recently, the concept of Welcome Stranger has been picked up again. Retro or revival? Is it in the air? What drives a senior as Schaap to reuse alternative instruments, tools of subversion? The newest Welcome Stranger series is indeed motivated by nowadays, political developments. Poetics and politics are brought together in these projects. Subtitle of the series is ”Secret”. First participants are Fluxus artists Shuzo Azuchi Gulliver (JP) and Tetsuo Kogawa (JP).
Since 2005 Schaap has been researching on the art intervention in urban as well as institutional settings. During this research she developed an interest for the performance as a pendant to the intervention. Both the performance and intervention are considered as immediate, time based acts.
Welcome Stranger projects can be seen as curatorial interventions in the conditions of daily, urban life. In urban contexts hiding away in private domains is a sine qua non, a survival strategy.
Since Welcome Stranger is again one of her topics, the interest of Schaap is shifting to the implementation of art activities as an act of intervention in other, social economical conditions. Or to say it simpler: her interest is shifting from urban areas to rural, transition zones.
