Background

“Our personal experience is one where the need for shelter has not only been an abstract concept but one of survival, escaping domestic violence and loneliness within the home situation and blatant racism outside of it. The need for such space and a support infrastructure has been elementary to understanding the importance of shelter in all its formats. The core question of what a shelter constitutes, as a space, is entangled with important questions on how it can serve as a haven of care.

A shelter is a basic necessity, a domestic archetype through which we can channel various intergenerational modes of activism – the feminist waves, the squatters movements, the postcolonial movement and their homebase as central organization unit, the organizations giving shelter to refugees – as well as very personal environments of reciprocal care or the lack thereof. Architecture is a powerful shaper of our environment through the political desire it channels and at the same time our environments construct and constrain us.”

A Situated Architecture As Communal Ritual

Following the research, SMET organizes various workshops and meetings in spring (in small covid-proof settings) that allow participants to engage in a more active conversation with each other about cohesion and cooperation as a form of shelter, as well as the urgency to implement this in a more constructive way. Various connections and (local) partners for further research are sought through workshops. For example, there will be a children’s workshop “Make your own shelter” with artist Navid Nuur, in which children are invited to build their own “dream”(t) house. Collaborative posters, postcards and (maga)zines are made, spoken word is written and cooking sessions in collaboration with local initiatives and organizations such as Stichting Netwerk and the Mamacafé are organized.

Collective building

In the course of the project, a mobile information booth will be built, a basic structure that will increasingly take shape on the basis of the insights that these workshops offer. The information booth will travel through Hoorn, seeking interaction with a variety of communities that can actively and physically annotate the information booth with their stories. The structure will outline the contours for a collective multimedia installation to be further developed, which is part of the summer exhibition at HMK, curated by Danai Giannoglou.

“During our residency at Hotel Maria Kapel, we will operate a mobile infobooth: a traveling, nomadic architecture. From here we will host walks, distribute analog information (brochures, pamphlets, and postcards) on Hoorn’s stories, and bring together different groups of people co-existing in the city and its surroundings.”

Art History School: Enter/Exit

Thursday 10 June, 19:30, an interactive (online) art history lecture by Iskra Vukšić, responding to the project Schelter in Place by Setareh Noorani & Matt Plezier.

Enter/Exit is a lecture around architecture as shelter. In a series of personal notes and associations, Iskra Vukšić juxtaposes the act of withdrawing inside our homes with that of departing. Through anecdotes of her home country and explorations of the material of concrete, she wonders: when do buildings harbour us, and under what conditions are we bound to leave them?

Iskra Vukšić is a Dutch-Croatian writer and artist with a background in art history and urban cultures and an MFA in Designing Democracy from the Sandberg Instituut. Her written and visual work moves between personal notes and societal observation, with a particular interest in workers, migration and historiography. Her texts were published in Metropolis M and with Public Art Amsterdam and Studio L A. Together with Ekaterina Volkova, she creates immersive installation-performances as the artistic partnership Vukšić&Volkova. 

Image: Iskra Vukšić, Concrete Exhaustion