Open

September - December  2022

The Bookstore Project Space, AmsterdamCollaboration with Jan Dirk Adams

Art is not social Work 

Being open is our main artistic principle of the project. It is about an ongoing negotiation among all participating parts and without defined and rigid hierarchies. Openness makes (socially engaged) art different from social work. In social work activities have a clear goal and aim towards an efficient outcome, failure and experiment must be avoided. This makes social work efficient and sustainable, but also leads to little possibilities to question and transform established structures. In an artistic project we can be open to all sort of situations and inputs to playfully experiment and explore alternatives on the costs of efficiency and sustainability. 

What we have often experienced in the context of socially engaged art projects is that the social and the artistic are kept apart. Often artistic practices like drawing are instrumentalized to solve social issues or to build community. We think this undermines the potential of art by reducing it to a tool and making it serve the established structure. For us socially engaged art is an artistic approach to the social/political. Pascal Gielen puts it as: “The challenge of commoning art thus consists of encouraging people and communities to chase their own dreams, wishes, and desires, often against traditional customs, legal frameworks, or market rules”. Within the artistic context participants can experience that failure does not lead to a catastrophe and that structures that seem to have no alternatives can be reinvented. The organization of a situation according to these values of “openness” regarding its social interaction and relations to the public context can in itself be beautiful and therefor be art.

Family of Strangers

Today I am entering Open at 6pm and find Malika, a neighbor and our new friend preparing to cook a meal. The room is warm, it smells like food. Bence is printing some drawings and Malika is looking at me with a welcoming face  “hey Dimitri”. Today it feels for the first time like I am not the host/facilitator of Open but just one of the participants. Now, I also need to understand what's going on, sense the social structure and find my place in it: “What can I help you with Malika?”. I start chopping onions. This moment seems to carry in it the core of Open. I feel the aesthetic experience, the beauty of it! A family of strangers. It seems that openness can create a deep, genuine connection among people in a very short time. Could everyday life be more like this? Could we be a family before being friends? (I met Malika a few times before, but at this moment it feels like we know each other for a long time, like she is my sister.). Today I can feel this warmth and hope while entering Open, this is what Open is all about. A prototype of a “society otherwise”. A society that is not built on personal profit or blood - family relationship, but a more general human connection and care for the other human. A society where everyone is already accepted and belonging, before proving themselves of anything. Unconditional care and love. 

Art is in the air

What I do feel, and what I haven’t felt to that extent in the prior projects is that “Open” becomes an environment in which I feel comfortable to make material art. It is meaningful, 

we make flyers, posters, furniture, and play music. It is all embedded into the material and conceptual space of “Open”. Instead of being in a capitalist context.  Here in “Open” artistic expression can exist and be shared with the community. Authorship is always challenged and at the border of dissolving. Sometimes, like with the lamps, visitors ask “Who made this one?” and “Who made that one?”,  “That one I like more!”. And I can feel that I am a bit sad if it's not my lamp that got the preference. Authorship is still in the air. Sometimes we say, we make it together, and it seems that people lose a little bit of their excitement when hearing that answer. Why would one ask that question anyway? What does it matter who made the lamp? With the flyers we manage to break it more open: Jan Dirk makes the design, I do the water colors and Bence ads pencil outlines. I think for me the goal is not to feel authorship at all, but to feel it collectively. When I look at the flyer, I believe that I made  it , in a sense of feeling belonging to it. The same goes to Bence and Jan Dirk, maybe.. These collective processes continue when we make furniture and food, not without struggle. Individual authorship seems to be an attitude to unlearn. But we try. Making becomes part of everyday life and is taken down from the art pedestal. art is in the air.

Openness

A central question for us became “how to be open?”. It is easy to be open, one could say: smile, ask questions that relate to what the person in front of you wants to talk about, be interested, don't judge ect. “ Do this and most people open up through your openness. But this method somehow seems fake if at the same time you are feeling annoyed by the person and don't care about the things they say. In this case it is almost sure that you will start building up frustration, and get stressed. How long can you do this without burning out? Also is it really fair towards the person to create an illusion of a space of compassion and acceptance that makes them share their most perverted and strange (in the opinion of commons sense) dreams, ideas and desires while you observe the situation from a higher meta-perspective of the game master. So how do you do it? How can you be genuinely open? How to make it authentic, how to make it in a way that it is comfortable for you, in a way that you do not have to hold it and fake it, but truly be in it, dance in it? We realized that we have to combine openness with our own identity and position. Elements that seem to oppose one another. Can you be open, loving, caring, not judgemental and at the same time yourself. “Love everyone and say the truth” as a great hindu saint used to teach their devotees. It is in a away a paradox. As a socio-political caracter can you talk to someone you totally disagree with and at the same time be in the space of love? We were thinking about a priest as parabel for this situation. In a confession the priest listens to the sinner with full compassion and acceptance and at the same time they give the sinner advice from a very particular position of their belief and faith. The sinner is not forced to accept the way but they can. Openness means to be able to engage into a discussion or even a fight while staying in the space of care for eachother. As if there would be a level of connection and respect beyond all socio-political possibilities of conflict, this level must have priority. Only that way we can live together feeling equal while being different. It also means while being fully sure about the validity of our own truth to allow for the possibility of being convinced otherwise. Openness is not a merely conceptual space. While talking about your own truth you should try to create this space of openness for the other, to materialize/manifest it in the choice of tone and the structure of your sentence. Even if you think that your truth is unmovable for openness it is only helpful to present it as movable, to give the other the space to enter it. You can not be afraid of losing your truth if you want to be open. In the end if you are sure about it, there is no reason to be afraid to lose it, you can play with the truth of the other and come back to yours and they will do the same. It is a dance, and both dancers if being truly open might take something home from it. This is what we have learned and we might be wrong.

Growing through openness 

It seems that for being able to learn from each other and to grow as a community one must have the safe space to speak one's truth without the fear of being excluded from the community. It is rather easy to please each other by creating a space of consensus. But this way no transformation is possible and no growth of the communal bond. It is important to make mistakes and to observe how people react to them, and to be corrected and to learn by agreeing or disagreeing in these situations.