Drie weken lang waren elf kunstenaars uit verschillende landen in en rond Leeuwarden in de weer met het maken van een kunstwerk. Het was het resultaat van een initiatief dat de vier Leeuwarder Rotaryclubs namen zodra bekend werd dat hun stad in 2018 Culturele Hoofdstad van Europa zou zijn.
Update by Martina van de Gey
In hetzelfde schuitje
4:77 minutes
Martina van de Gey 2018
A boy rowing his boat over the Ganges
in the early morning, the pyres are still
burning on the shore, men are washing
clothes and the faithful are bathing in the river.
The oars of the boat dive into the water, reflecting
the dull light of the sun.
A canoe with teenagers in colorful sportswear
appears and thwarts the direction of the boat
on the Ganges. These are students who train
on the canal in Leeuwarden early in the
morning and now seemingly paddle along
the sacred river with the Indian boy.
Leeuwarden and Varanasi separate
exactly 8105 kilometers, India lies in a different
time zone and in the holiest city of the
Hindus on the Ganges there is a completely
foreign culture for us.
Even if the distance between the two places
is large and the cultures could not be more
different, we are all connected with the eternal water
circulation around the globe
and people face the same challenges
of a dramatically changing world: global
warming and rising sea levels threaten our
very existence and we need to solve the problems
globally – we are all in the same boat,
in hetzelfde schuitje.
Foto, Video, Copyright: Martina van de Gey
Farewell dinner at Stania State
It was a relaxed evening with artists, host families and volunteer helpers at Stania State in Oentsjerk. We had a fine evening with nice food and lovely company. But, it was also a goodbye to you artists!
Some of them still will see each other in the weekend, for others it was a kind of saying goodbye.
Volunteers: without you this project could not succeed. Thanks to the host families: because of you, the artists could feel at home.
Artists: thank you for your energy and impressions you brought us and we could enjoy your great artwork.
Open Studio visit by the embassy of Poland
Katarzyna Banaszkiewicz, head of the Political – Economic Section of the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in the Netherlands visited the AIR exhibition. Kamila Elżbieta Wolszczak (from Poland) left on the photo, right side: Doet Boersma, initiator of this international project.
Publicatie Omrop Fryslân over AIR
Uit verschillende hoeken van de wereld zijn kunstenaars naar Leeuwarden gekomen. Fotografen, beeldende kunstenaars en schilders kijken ze met hun eigen achtergrond naar Fryslân. Ze laten zich door onze provincie inspireren tot het maken van nieuwe schilderijen, installaties en bouwwerken.
Lees verder op:
Open Studio Impression by Marcos Lora Read
My artistic career began some 25 years ago and during this period has revolved around several fundamental axes, and despite feeling like a sculptor I have specialized in different media. Because for me the fundamental thing is to work with an idea, hence I look for the most appropriate means to carry out and express my idea. So the support can reach a steel sculpture of 9 meters, to a video, a collage, or a conventional canvas.
In Leeuwarden I’m using photography to get closer to the history of the region and its relationship with the Friesian cow, using different means and resources to develop a two-dimensional and mixed work between collage and painting. That goes from figurative to abstract.
The project is based on documenting a day of the Powergree farm, a farm with 150 heads of pure Holsteins cattle, where the day starts at 3 in the morning with the milking of the cows. In addition Powergree produces its own energy through a bio generate, which is capable of general enough energy to sell 80% of its output to the community, which makes it double efficient and a perfect model of sustainability, something that interests me to transmit in this series of works
Open Studio Impression by Orhan Kamil
REMEMBERED MUSIC
‘Tis said, the pipe and lute that charm our ears
Derive their melody from rolling spheres;
But Faith, o’erpassing speculation’s bound,
Can see what sweetens every jangled sound.
We, who are parts of Adam, heard with him
The song of angels and of seraphim.
Out memory, though dull and sad, retains
Some echo still of those unearthly strains.
Oh, music is the meat of all who love,
Music uplifts the soul to realms above.
The ashes glow, the latent fires increase:
We listen and are fed with joy and peace.
Open Studio Impression by Diedel Klöver
‘The lionleanson Leeuwarden’
Thatisthe name of the sculpture, I’ve built forEuropean Cultural Capital Leeuwarden 2018.
The lion is in the weapon of Leeuwarden.
Leeuwarden is a bicycle town, it shows a kind of freedom, everybody on bicycles, saying hallo by riding, it‘s an open community, that gave me the idea, to use scrap bicycles and transform them to a lion…..and it works.
I love work with scrap material that had a live already and I put néw life in it. The Rotary clubs collected old bicycles I used.
I enjoyed my stay in Leeuwarden, my first time in this small , lively town, it is an exiting experiment to work here. A proper organisation by the Rotary clubs/ Doet Boersma: thank you for that initiative. Thanks to Astre and Roel Fischer, they gave their best hospitality and made me feel home. Foppe Oreel, gave me that great work place at his factory, without that it could not succeed.
I hope, the lion will find a good place, to rest and lean comfortable against a wall of Leeuwarden.
If you want to see more of my works,you are welcome to visit my sculpture garden in Germany!
Diedel Klöver.
Yard Art, Dangasterstr. 96, 26316 Varel (near Jever, Germany)
https://de-de.facebook.com/yardartkloever02/
Open Studio Impression by Kamila Wolszczak
“LET’S DRAW OUR FRIESLAND”
proposal for a sculpture in a public space in Leeuwarden
During my residency project I was involving people to draw on the map of Friesland their own shapes by tandem bike.
An important aspect was to do this together in pairs to share and exchange ideas along the way. Next step was saving their digital routes to show the drawing we made. Our bike was the pencil on the map. To make and save our drawings on Friesland we needed a mobile GPS application which followed our position.
The work in this project focused on the process between artists and participants, participants in couples, participants and the region/landscape. The relation between all these elements is art mediation which is a tool to create an engaged audience in a creative art process. In this project, random people became a group and together created the new shapes of Friesland. It is a kind of delegated performance when I don’t know exactly what the final results will be and I need to trust the participants’ imagination. This idea is also a method of drawing by bike in a big scale and create new collages of lines, which is a way to combine our daily life with new quality of the touristic human-powered bicycle. A result of my three week artistic process is a model of shapes which we created and I transformed to a small sculpture. I believe that I will be back soon to Leeuwarden to build up a big scale neon sculpture around 2m x 2m in public space. During the open studio presentation you can also find my new collection of paintings called “Faces of Friesland”, inspired by the Frisian representative colours.
Kamila Wolszczak, PL
www.kamilawolszczak.wordpress.com
Open Studio Impression bu Jürgen Kling
Just one week after beginning my work in Leeuwarden, the way of painting and the palette of colors have changed. Even the format has got another one. Coming here, I usually used an upright size of canvas. In the meanwhile it got a horizontal, surely influenced by the impressions that this flat Frisian landscape is giving to me.
Wide horizons, dikes, fences, channels, rows of trees and finally the never ending series of bikes in the city are building the sketches of my paintings. These horizontal lines are circling around my areas of color and are catching them.
My main topic is still water, as the connecting element between landscape and people. Always in movement. It seems to be harmonic and quiet.
Yesterday behind the dikes, life was getting to a standstill. In the next minute a herd of horses was galloping across a field, suddenly stopping to continue the concerted grazing. Even sheep were moving invisible, like bright stones in the meadow, ready to get woolly clouds floating in the green wet flat.
Fortunately I will never find out, what about sheep are reflecting in this moment.
Jürgen Kling
