Rotterdam, Netherlands
Mission Title: The Art of Exploitation - Atelier Van Lieshout
Mission Date: 22-07-2008
SCRIPT
- Go along the Rotterdam port and tape it, capture its atmosphere. Reach the AVL laboratories, located in an old industrial building.
- Explore Joep Van Lieshout's atelier and former free state. Show its spaces and talk to the designers and the workers. How do they like working there? Is it a democratic space or a job like any other? When the AVL was a free state, was there anything resembling anarchic wilderness?
- Interview Van Lieshout. In all of his work, he deals with issues of space and uses art as a model to explore the troublesome moral weak spots of architecture and design. Ask him about this and the sticky issues of legal space, self
- sustainability, and freedom.
TRAVEL BAG
What are the individual and collective rights of space?
There's something sinister about Atelier Van Lieshout. The workshop run by impresario Joep Van Lieshout works in a variety of fields - art, architecture and design – and the atelier's pieces range from a penis-shaped sculpture to AVL-ville, an actual free state with its own money, constitution and energy, realized in the Rotterdam port area in 2001. Van Lieshout's works of design share the anthropomorphic esthetics of Gaetano Pesce's, and his uber-cynical, scatological, black humor sits somewhere in-between the Yes Men and Gunther Von Hagens. A common denominator would be consideration for individual freedom and the idea of a human scale society, but his borderline irony is somewhat threatening.
There is a tight relationship between contemporary art and anarchy, and Van Lieshout has been doing his best, with his privileged artist status, to experiment with social issues such as exploitative work and personal freedom. AVL's living structures often deal with constriction and slavery, but they're all environment friendly, as to state society should think about personal rights as well as about climate change. The Atelier plays so hard and fast that what the green movement calls "self-sustainability" is quickly transformed into fascist autarchy, what CEOs call "corporate efficency" is quickly brought to its zenith in the self-sustaining slave worked call center project, also recycling unfit human beings to provide the others with energy.
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