Ergens en op één plaats: een geknoopt verhaal

Photos: Naomi Jansen

(Somewhere, someplace: a tangled story)

This book is a game. It is a co-creation experiment together with the children of Kindcentrum de Vindplaats during my 10-month stay at the Gastatelier with Stichting de Resident.

We played, ran, drew, dreamed, laughed, and connected in our different ways and through broken languages.

We discovered our surrounding spaces through drawing, play, learning, and growth. The children guided me as we experimented in the studio and on the streets of Amsterdam, allowing me to see the space and the book pages through their very unique perspectives.

The result is a transmedia project that includes a booklet intended to serve as a walking playmate, combining the sounds and drawings created together with the children, as well as a walking performance in the city. The interactive book, sounds, and installation showcase our shared experiences and the joy of learning together, inviting you, the reader, to add your own experiences to ours through drawing or writing.

It all started with a stripboekfabriek, a comic book factory that we built together, where the children could leave their drawings and stories for me to transform into something new.

This factory sits, of course, in a city. A mini-city where we created our own space through playing, imagining and working together with recycled materials of the Kunstatelier. This mini-city is, naturally, spread across the pages of a book that we composed throughout the 10 months we worked together.

By using and reusing our materials, we repurposed our initial thoughts and drawings, changed our minds, changed our minds again, used too much glue and too many pages in one go, and composed all the different pages that are part of the installation.

All the elements of this transmedia installation were worked on in a co-creation practice. I could not tell you exactly whose idea this or that page was and who started to build little houses with wood blocks. Most likely, the children did.

My role in composing this installation was one of the mediator. Mediating between the children and all the available materials and techniques and between all the resulting work and the pages of the booklet in a process of assemblage.

More than anything else, Ergens en op één plaats is an invitation to go outside and play, to make space and to reclaim your city in a familiar but simultaneously very different way.