The Rotterdam-based artist Jeanne Van Heeswijk's work engages with the setting up of 'collaborative production' between people involved in processes of urban development. Through methods that focus on 'acting together' she attempts to establish opportunities for people to form and establish interest groups, small communities in themselves, in order to effectively discuss and trigger change on a neighbourhood level. Van Heeswijk describes her position as that of a mediator between situations, places and people – facilitating various kinds of open actions and interactions. Yet, this role is not simply about the integration of many voices, but about questioning and confronting all involved, from children to city officials, from policy makers to planners and from 'insiders' to 'outsiders', in order to 'generate models that do justice to, for instance, the complexity of the integration issue.' Het Blauwe Huis (The Blue House), a project which started in 2005 and was situated in a real house within one of the to be developed housing blocks, was an attempt to provide a space for the messy, lived and indeterminate activities in an otherwise entirely planned and controlled development plan for the IJburg area in Amsterdam, an area which today provides 18,000 dwellings for 45,000 residents. Over a four-and-a-half-year period, van Heeswijk curated the detached single-family house to become a space for international artists, writers, and architects from which to engage with the growing population of IJburg and the wider public. At the same time, the house temporarily provided turban functions not yet provided for in the new neighbourhood: a children's library, a cheap restaurant, a flower shop. Over the duration of the project and through the involvement of thousands of participants, the house became an incubator, a condenser, from which the use and appropriation of the urban realm and public space could be studied and intervened from. Another focus of Van Heeswijk's work are young people and adolescents. Commonly overlooked in planning processes, she is interested in finding mechanisms through which to empower this group to voice their opinions and to critically engage and participate. The project 'Face Your World' was initially a collaboration with the Wexner Center for the Arts in Ohio, USA, in 2002 and engaged local children aged 6 to 12 to use computers and especially developed programmes to rethink, rearrange and reconfigure their neighbourhoods. The project was re-enacted in 2005 in the Slotervaart area of Amsterdam and again in Rotterdam in 2006, when 2,500 children participated in workshops and actions to design their own museum park for the area between the OMA designed Kunsthal and Museum Boijmans. In 2010, Van Heeswijk was invited by the Liverpool Biennial to contribute to the project 2Up 2Down and subsequently also brought the Manchester-based cooperative practice Urbed on board. Here, the artist and architects are working together with a group of young people from Liverpool's Anfield / Breckfield with the aim to develop a series of empty 2up-2down properties into 'affordable retrofit of a community facility and local housing'. Van Heeswijk's approach foregrounds the social aspects of engagement and the design of processes that are interested in the building up of skills – from communication to construction. Aware that empowerment is strongly connected to knowledge of, for example processes, systems and mechanisms and the ability to express this knowledge, her work strategically connects different actors to enable social change. Radicalizing the Local, a network of interventions, Museum of Arte Útil - Van Abbemuseum The Blue House (Amsterdam IJburg, 2005-2009) Jeanne van Heeswijk icw Herve Paraponaris and Dennis Kaspori Pump up The Blue (by Herve Paraponaris, with Recycloop by 2012 architecten) Photo: Ramon Mosterd Face Your World, Urban Lab Slotervaart (Amsterdam Slotervaart, 2005) Jeanne van Heeswijk & Dennis Kaspori Neighbourhood presentation Photo: Dennis Kaspori Source texte Source Main image Image jeanneworks.net

The exhibition "Travelling Farm Museum of Forgotten Skills 2022 Spring Collection" opens on the 28th of May at Casco, Utrecht, the Netherlands. Travelling Farm Museum of Forgotten Skills (TFM) was established by Casco Art Institute and The Outsiders in 2020 after our joint initiative to enliven and common a dysfunctional farmhouse in Utrecht’s Leidsche Rijn with multiple self-initiated activities of caring, learning and sharing. Once a vast, peripheral farmland providing food to the region, Leidsche Rijn is now occupied by housing blocks and over forty-thousand human inhabitants. Deprived of its surrounding farmland, the farmhouse reactivated by The Outsiders, Casco and many other neighbours and friends was eventually sold to a private developer and repurposed as a restaurant.  Yet our commoning journey has continued, in the same way one of our initial questions – ‘’do we know where our food comes from?’’ – remains ever more relevant. Departing from the farmhouse, Casco Art Institute and The Outsiders started travelling in the region and actively explored the agricultural past and present. We started connecting with old and new farming initiatives across Leidsche Rijn, creating the possibility to un/learn and share forgotten skills of living together with nature. The Museum architecture is a mobile vehicle that merges into its environment as it travels. It is a tangible repository for a growing collection of objects, knowledge, skills, and stories. Above all, it is a repository for the TFM’s relationships between farmers, citizens, artists and non-human beings. "Travelling Farm Museum of Forgotten Skills 2022 Spring Collection" is the first collection-exhibition of the museum held at Casco Art Institute. Here, we are metaphorically and literally spring cleaning – sorting out “things” stocked not only in the depot of TFM but also in the minds of many who were part of the journey of the museum. The exhibition “re-collects” what resources and relationships have been cultivated over two special years – coinciding with the pandemic – and shares these resources and relationships with a wider public.  The exhibition-collection presents cultural tools for resilient living in times of multifaceted crises with a focus on the commons, ecology, and heritage. Among the tools presented is a series of folding screens that function as a central weaver of re-collections. In East Asian cultural traditions, the folding screen often depicts nature and written literature. Serving multiple purposes, the folding screen may be used to exhibit, divide a room, or shelter against the wind. In the context of the TFM, the screen also re-presents what was seen and experienced in various farms or farm-related initiatives in the surroundings of Leidsche Rijn that the Museum travelled to – unfolding some of memory and stories from the journey.  The exhibition-collection also launches the Travelling Farm Museum of Forgotten Skills’ regular tour program that runs through August. Visitors are cordially invited to join the tour to experience and learn from the Museum. These tours allow us to get in touch with a territory beyond the urban grid, where ecological ways of living together are practiced.

The City in the Making foundation (“Stichting Stad in de Maak”) was set up in 2013 in response to two urban issues: How can ‘stuck up’ (and thus vacant) real estate be given a local social function instead of long-term vacancy? How can city dwellers be more directly involved in the development of their street, neighborhood and city? City in the Making uses such long-term vacant real estate to develop activities that bring about the involvement of city residents in their own living situation and environment. Vacancy has a negative effect (deterioration, disinvestment). And it is equally socially irresponsible to leave parts of the city empty while there is an urgent need for affordable space for living, working and local initiative. Temporary Housingj, by Stad in Maak Pieter de Raadtj, by Stad in Maak Stokerij, by Stad in Maak Source text