“Nihao”!(“Hello”in Chinese), I’m Henriette Waal, I’m an artist and public space designer and I’d like to thank you on behalf of all of The Cook, the Farmer team because it was collaborative project, and for inviting us here to this forum. The Cook, the Farmer, His Wife, and Their Neighbor, this title does not only refer to a beautiful film of Peter Greenway but we chose it because it refers to the people, and we wanted to represent the people in the title. It refers to the people, the city of Amsterdam had forgotten about when they made renewal plans for Amsterdam New West in the year 2000. New West was at that time the biggest European city renewal area and the new west was a poor neighborhood and the city of Amsterdam planned to demolish a lot of buildings there and actually move the people that lived there to more outside of the city, so that richer people could live the New West. It was a very top down approach and with The cook, the Farmer, this neighbor we proposed a community garden and a community kitchen as a pilot and as an experiment to counteract this asocial, top down approach. The cook, the Farmer is a collaborative project we were with a group, of producers, to architects to designers, sociologists, and myself, and later we joined forces with my teacher, Paul Ridge. We called ourselves Wilde Westen, meaning Wild Westerners, as we were the first art project to land in this neighborhood full of social workers. My role in this project lay in the cooperation between residents and green experts and setting actions in motion, I was actually the one that really worked on site.
Before we dive into The cook, the Farmer, I’d like to show you two other projects that I did, which also make relationships between the people and the landscape. This is the first one. It is an outside brewery. I did this project to question our relationship to water. With this mobile brewery you can clean water and brew beer and other drinks on the spot, and make kindsof super local drinks. Actually why I also chose this picture is that you see on the right side you see a woman who was actually part of The Cook, the Farmer and because of this project she was stimulated to start up her own restaurant and catering service and she joins me in this project we still have and she made out of the roots, flowers, and herbs of the garden, she makes syrups and then she joins us in this brewery. Other project is also in a neighborhood in transition but it’s in the countryside, it’s also a response to a top down approach. It’s actually farmland that’s not farmland anymore and the Dutch government now said it’s a new nature. But they forgot about the people who live there and use this land, about the local people, what role do they have in this new nature and how is this new nature going to be maintained? The locals in these green fields, they fear that the green fields will become a swamp or a forest, and they also fear for the city people who will come there to recreate. What you see is an adventure we organized there to… what we do, we kind of search with the locals, but also with outsiders for new kinds of recreation and maintenance. And this actually a hunting adventure, it’s a fake hunt, because hunting is actually dying out in the Netherlands. And at this same time we suffer, for instance, from a big problem regulating the goose population and what we do is actually use these adventures as a way to exchange knowledge, and yea, it’s still in process. This is also, part of this… this is a kind of fake gun. This is another adventure in which we collaborate with artists and ceramists. What we did was, we dug the local clay, with all this different artists, we made, this is one artist who made these cups with the local clay in the fields.
Okay, now we come to The Cook, the Farmer again… yea, this is a very important map I want to show you about The Cook, the Farmer, His Wife, and His Neighbor, this is in the 1930’s, this is called the general expansion plan of Amsterdam. The city of Amsterdam in red, you see where Amsterdam was planned to expand. And here you see the area when it was built after the First World War, so you see that there is a lot of green space in between the houses, it was thought, this neighborhood was thought as spacious housing for local incomes with lots of green space, the houses had very minimalistic aesthetics, with glass, concrete and steel that was very modern of course at that time and it was all like very strictly designed. You have to imagine that putting your laundry outside in the neighborhood. And here you see it from the ground when it was just built. Putting your laundry outside was not even allowed, it was seen as a corruption of space. But during the time it was built my grandmother, who was also from Amsterdam, she told me she often went there on her bike because it was a kind of utopian dream but as soon as this area, as soon as people started to live there, it turned out to be very different, than in the utopian plan. From the beginning the area really lacked a social cohesion. As you look at this picture you can imagine that there are really big spaces in between buildings and also the people that were going to live there, in the plan, were kind of all the same, but the people that really started to live there were all from different areas, were very multi-ethnic, from different parts of the world. So, this caused the green which was actually meant, the beauty and the strength of the neighborhood, got fenced off, there were too many problems, there was criminality, and so they put fences around all the green, and then you got this, what we call in The Cook the Farmer, looking only green. Then the government of Amsterdam made the renewal plans in 2009 but they were still a very much focused on form instead of doing something about this lack of social cohesion. So when we were asked by Wilde Westento come up with a plan for more entrepreneurship, for how to make this neighborhood more hip, in fact, we said, well, you know, we propose to renew with the people itself, with the people who live there now, we are curious who these people are and we want to give them a platform and we want to facilitate to their dreams on various levels. Well, our commissioner said no way and they cancelled the project. And that was the moment where my teacher Potridge was invited by this StedelijkMuseumin Amsterdam. The museum had no building at that moment and they were interested to do a project in the New West and the director said:“I really like your idea,let’s do it”. And then we also met another housing corporation that was not in the coalition that originally commissioned us, and this housing corporation really liked our idea so they came up with this space, it’s as you can see, it’s a fenced off garden, in the top you see a buildingwhich was empty. There were a lot of little shops before, but it also never worked because of course there came a big shopping center and now all these little shop buildings were empty. So as you see on the right bottom, looking only green, where people have no access to it, but they look at it.
So what I did to start this community garden and community kitchen, I just started hanging around in the area, I went to people’s houses, I did their groceries with them, I helped picking them up at metros. I talked to the people that live around this piece of green and this a story Hannah, who you just also saw in the brewery picture, she told me, she already wrote a letter to the housing corporation that she really would like to get her hands on this piece of green and because of her lack of proper Dutch, or I don’t know what was the problem, they didn’t allow her to get her hands on the green, and the reason was, that they said, we would rather keep the area green, since that was what it was meant for, but she said: “but I want to grow plants there, I want to keep it green and edible”. By contacting the neighbors I realized that actually it was a very good idea to organize the garden in that area because a lot of people living there came from the countryside and so they still knew very well how to grow plants and there were also a lot of homeless people, so the advantage is they had a lot of time of course, to spend on the garden. In the middle of this images you see a garden I found somewhere else in the neighborhood, it was an illegal garden, a Turkish woman started it, so by contacting the neighbors I discovered that there was actually a lot of knowledge about farming and a lot of people who really wished to have access to this green, and what I also found out was that people paid for the green so that in the rent, they actually paid for this looking only green. So, what we found out was that actually we didn’t have to organize a garden or anything, it would be enough if we just opened the fence, but then, how to divide the garden. So what we did was, we made a kind of grid in the garden, so with orange flowers we made a kind of pixels in the garden so that when the people came in the garden they could easily divide the garden amongst them. And, we in collaboration with the residents we built a kitchen in the empty shop and we used very simple construction methods so we could really build it on the spot, so this kitchen was a kind of social activation. And it was, you have to imagine e these people, they didn’t have contact with each other, they were scared to go on the streets, so it was really something that we did this there. So here you see on the left bottom a mural of my teacher which normally would be placed inside The StedelijkMusemsonow it was present in the neighborhood of New West Amsterdam. And what was really nice was when she made these murals there, people immediately started talking about what was actually happening to their neighborhood. Before it was kind of a non-talkable issue because of course it’s not so nice to talk about how your house will be destroyed within a year, but we were lucky that the world crisis came so most of the houses are still there.
So then we opened up the garden and then, the reactions were enormous everyone came and we spread this, on the right you see this papers on which people could already kind of start thinking about filling in their garden and this is one done by a kid, because children were also able to start a garden, and this kid says: she wants an apple tree, a big garden, and a cucumber tree, and I don’t know if a cucumber tree exists. And so this is after two weeks, the whole garden was filled already and we decided to really do everything ourselves, so we really, with the people started preparing the earth to grow. And by doing it was really a good action to connect with all the people, and what was very special was that we had twenty two different ethnic groups in the garden and you can imagine all these people from all different places, they eat different food, they have knowledge about different plants, so it was really nice, an exchange, also because the vegetables were cooked in the collective kitchen. Here are images from the garden. This picture I chose to show you that it was very fragile to balance the different cultures in the area and also to, for instance, a lot of women they, before were not even allowed out of their house, but because this was so close, and so nice, then they came into the garden. But it was all very fragile still. These are Surinam roots, wrapped in newspaper, taken from XXX, because a lot of people started bringing their own roots when they went on holiday to their original country and they came with their own roots, I thought this was very beautiful. We also organized a program to connect with, for instance, different grades or initiatives in Amsterdam and in the Netherlands, but also internationally. On the left bottom you see a squatter who came to visit and build a compost heap together with the rest of the residents and explain about permaculture. It was really important to have these workshop programs to keep openness, because it was actually quite a small space so you have to watch out that it keeps on developing. So for instance we went hunting for fish, here Muhammad is fishing and then preparing with the cook, the local fish, and also we started making things together, here we are making a fruit bowl with recycled newspapers. I was very happy with Ordea, a 28 year old morocco woman told me this, she said: “The Cook the Farmer, the Wife and His Neighbor has made everything more fun. I wanted to stay, I think it has brought me out of the house, a whole a lot of people know me now, and they ask, have you always lived here? Yes! I tell them, but we didn’t know you at all. Well, at first I didn’t wear a head scarf so maybe that what it was, but really I was never out in the neighborhood. This has brought me out.” I think this is wonderful, yet it also shows that the project kind of changed something in the safety of the area. But then someone, we never found out who, threw a stone a threw the window, and it was during the Ramadan time. We found out that this was because the women, a lot of the Moroccan women, never had a place to go outside of the house and then they didn’t wear their headscarves inside of our kitchen, because it was a home. But because it had big windows, some of their husbands were probably not so happy with it. But we decided not to put up any curtains. Here you see a group of a people visiting the project because of course the StedelijkMuseum was involved so it became also a destination. A lot of people from the center of Amsterdam, but also all of the Netherlands came to visit this project and everything went well. And now these kids stole my camera. Why? And then they came after a week or so to return it and then I found these pictures on it. I thoughtit’s so funny, I’m constantly taking these pictures of the people because it’s for me, people are my material, but I wasn’table to make this beautiful pictures of the garden, so it was really nice. This is the gardenafter the second season, if I remember well, you see that it has become a whole world of its own. And here you see how it was before, or actually, it’s the garden next to it, it was taken at the same time. At least I think it was my last image. So, I’ll just end here. |
