or
The Artist as a Site Researcher

a project with Lara Almarcegui
October-December 2003

Researching a location is the first step necessary in the development of a project. Such an investigation opens up many questions that inevitably produce a critical attitude towards a city. Most of the questions that will be generated are related to how the city is displayed and how this display affects citizens: What possibilities have inhabitants of a city to escape this urban display? Can they transform it? Is there any site available? Which actions may citizens take to resists the given space?

This project was based on the idea of Guided Tour. Each participant carried out an investigation of a location in Rotterdam, finding a way to present this site and explain what is happening there. The site could be presented with a guided tour, but also with an event, a tourist folder, a guide or a map, etc.

Lara Almarcegui (Spain) is an artist based in Rotterdam. Central to her work is a fascination for the inventive ways in which inhabitants do not conform to a given space but are critical and active towards urban spaces while building their own. Almarcegui has engaged with wastelands, empty lots, demolition sites and self-constructed places such as allotment gardens, all are spaces that escape the design of architects and urban planners and that do not correspond with the official organisation of urban planning. For her these places are exemplary social spaces that challenge our thinking about how we look at our living environment. In the same way, each participant’s selection of a location involved taking a position towards the city.

Parallel to the individual research projects, the project looked at the work of other artists that are related with the idea of carefully studying a specific location and the guided tour: from the surrealists, the situationist ‘derive’, and Robert Smithson’s tour to Passaic Monuments to more contemporary psychogeographic practices. Invited guest presentations included Lorenzo Romito from Stalker, an initiative of a group of students who, tired of being enclosed in their architectural school, started walks around the periphery of Rome; Boris Sieverts, who initiated ‘Büro fur Stadtreisen’ dedicated to organize excursions through the industrial sites surrounding Cologne; and Spanish film maker Jose Luis Guerin whose films capture a building or village and its memory and future.