30 Sep 2010

Opening Expodium Orbits #3

Expodium Orbits #3
Visual Translation: Archive of Impressions

Nikos Doulos and João Evangelista

Expodium presents the process-based work of artists Nikos Doulos (GR) and João Evangelista (PT) on 'shrinking cities and emerging strategies', taken from their collaboration during their 64 days residency in Detroit (US).

Detroit's situation can be read as a visual manifestation of the new post-industrial city, a hybrid of a paradoxical alignment of the urban and the rural, taking place in a single geographical frame, wrapped in a mediatic representation caught between delusion and illusion, between 'ruin-porn' photography and the idea of a safe haven for artists.
The city displays far more complex signals that constitute the beginning of a whole new attempt towards a gentrification process, suggesting the rebirth of Detroit into a city of the future.

The multiple events scheduled during October 2010 will revolve around the traces and marks the residency left on the artists. Through a modular narrative in stages, the audience is invited to dive into Detroit's current state and future development.

01.10. 5pm | STATION ONE | Expodium
'Visual Translation: Archive of Impressions'
Exhibition following the one-month 'translation process' the artists have undergone since their arrival back in the Netherlands.

17.10. 5pm: STATION THREE – Kikker Theatre
Expodium's Detroit Residency @ IMPAKT FESTIVAL 2010 – MATRIX CITY
An evening event where the audience is invited to imagine the city landscape through arrivals and departures, an archive of impressions and stories being told.

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This exhibition takes place within the research trajectory 'Malleability Revisited: The need for new Strategies':

Our day is characterised by crises. The models with which we have been familiar for decades have collapsed or prove outdated. Our first impulse is to see such crises as negative and undesirable. As its point of departure Expodium seeks to approach the apparently negative development of 'shrinkage' from a positive angle, and investigate what results around a shrinkage situation can be employed on behalf of future urban development.

Since the 1960s Western society has been totally orientated to growth, whether in an economic, social, scientific or political sense. Right down to the present these growth models are still used for the design of our society.
But through ageing, young people moving to urban areas, and the shrinkage of the industrial base, many areas in The Netherlands are faced with shrinking populations.

Growth thinking, in which growth equals progress, is deeply ingrained. Many governmental administrators resist the idea of population decline. Their reasoning is that shrinkage means a decline in municipal finances, economising on community facilities and programmes, and falling tax revenues. Thus, for the time being, they push ahead with building. However, it is high time that administrators and policy-makers wake up to facts and begin to enter into the following phase of the process, namely acceptance of and actively dealing with the problem. Because of the declining population and structural labour shortages, the future is going to be very different from the past, in all sorts of ways. Those in government have to realise that facilities do not disappear just as a result of population decline, but also because of increases in social scale.
New policies will have to be developed. Where up until now the central question was how quickly business parks, roads and dwellings had to be built, from now on policy-makers will have to take the question into account of just how much should be built until the population reaches its apex, and thereafter.

Expodium proposes to go in search of the opportunities and new prospects that shrinkage brings with it.

The central question here is, what chances, possibilities and new strategies can be distilled from a shrinkage situation? Art and culture can play an important role in finding answers to this question.

The role of, and vision that is created on the basis of the autonomy of the visual arts will be important for the development of new strategies and structures. It is our belief that the input of autonomous thinking is of critical importance at the moment, and will be intensely valuable for the urban dweller's ability to adapt to the future.

Participating artists:
Philippe Van Wolputte (BE)
Ruth Sacks (RSA)
Francesca Grilli (IT)
Sachi Miyachi (JPN)
Julien Grossmann (FR)
Pilvi Takala (FIN)
Chris Meighan (SCO)