Month: May 2012

A handmade “red carpet” for a handmade film premiere….

Today we participate in Prototyping Futures / Occupying The Present, a weekend of presentations, workshops and events initiated by Piet Zwart Institute that “gathers scholars from diverse disciplines to explore strategies of resistance, intervention, and critical production in response to the crises of the present.” As the project premiere looms, it’s exciting to share The Sound We See: Rotterdam process alongside presentations from Michael Murtaugh, Danja Vasilev and Julian Oliver, Mitchell Joachim, Jan Jongert, Inke Arns and Bik Van der Pol. A big hats off to our PZI friends Renee Turner, Vanessa Tuitel, Petra van der Kooij, Leslie Robbins and Timo Klok for making it all happen!

As they say in the funny papers, you have to get back on the horse that threw you so today Julie treats me to a Market Tour/Market Tasting/Culinary Demonstration at none other than Le Cordon Bleu. By the end of this six-hour extravaganza of fresh French cuisine we are chortling like Julia Child, completely delirious on asperges sauvages with hollandaise and caviar, blood sausage, ash-dusted cheese, cherry tomatoes, black truffles, chervil, quail eggs, pork rillettes, ripe melon, rhubarb tart with almond cream, and about a thousand other tasty delights… Although Victor made us nervous at times, under the capable eyes of Chef Patrick #1 and Chef Patrick #2, no chickens were dropped on the floor during the making of this blog post!

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd ;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

— Ezra Pound

A rather horrific bout of food poisoning (no… not from Brasserie Lipp last night but from the delicious chicken/bacon/egg/mayonaise sandwich I bought at Rotterdam Centraal and ate on the train) keeps me in bed or bathroom all day… If there’s an upside to being sick in Paris, it’s having your mom and sister on hand to nurse you back to health with white peonies, Orangina, blue blankets and Marriage Frères Earl Grey…

Back in Montmartre with Mom and Sis… a little lady time is exactly what I need right now. Let the eating begin!

 

It’s sunny. It’s Monday. The perfect day for a very long bike ride! All the way to the dunes of Den Haag and back… through villages, countryside, industrial wastelands and forests. The object of this epic ride: James Turrell’s Celestial Vault: “The work is not a sculpture in the landscape but a tool to look at light and color.” Today, the light is magnificent.

For today’s Sound We See session, Loek leads a skill share on how to make our own music instruments out of found materials. Three cacophonous hours later, we’ve got a band!

Although our time in Rotterdam is winding down, the city continues to reveal daily delights and oddities… like the “particulier terrein” we discover on the way to Wilma Kun’s Brazilian Birthday Party at Kunst & Complex… Remnants of the Freestate of AVL-Ville!

After weeks of planning, the day has finally arrived: the first ever Bakfiets Guerrilla Film Screening! Sparked by conversations as part of our DIY presentation some weeks back, the event is entirely organized, curated and presented by third year Willem de Kooning Academy fine arts students Lianne, Sarah, Pip, Nin Ke and Meral and features a lovely array of short experimental films (including one completed just hours earlier at Esther Urlus’ 16mm WORM workshop), homemade popcorn in one-of-a-kind bags, an enthusiastic kazoo orchestra that attracted the participation of two local ducks, a rousing round of Bingo, a Crunchy Nuts give-away, and a Chuck Berry dance party. Even the police are won over by the good vibe! Go, ladies, go!

And if this isn’t enough, the glorious night is topped off by the opening of Sound We See: Rotterdam participant/Piet Zwart Institute first year student Dennis van Vreden’s ビヨンセ! Biyonse at Roodkapje. Shake it, baby, shake it!