Waste Spaces, Wasted Spaces, Wasteful Spaces
The paper 'Waste Spaces, Wasted Spaces, Wasteful Spaces: New Strategies for Artist Led Projects in the Public Realm' by Wiard Sterk, Director, CBAT The Arts and Regeneration Agency and Jeroen van Westen, artist, was presented to the Urban Drift 2002 conference in Berlin.
The paper deals with the shift in CBAT's role from responding to commissioning opportunities in the public realm, to taking the lead in elements of the regeneration process by exploiting its knowledge of the decision-making process, developing new partnerships and creative strategic work.
It focusses in particular on the work of Dutch artist Jeroen van Westen. In the 'Muizengaatje' project in Rotterdam, van Westen and his colleagues Q S Serafijn, Hans Snoek and Maarten van Westmael developed a proposal to open up and celebrate the character of a neglected and problematic space under a motorway flyover, returning it to mainstream public access and use. They followed this by examining the entire length of the motorway flyover which dissects Rotterdam. The project called 'Restruimten', Wastelands or Leftover Spaces, explored the nature of those spaces in cities which are left unremarked and uncared for for a variety of reasons.
Van Westen was recently engaged by CBAT on a project in Cardiff, commissioned by a commercial client who manages an active landfill site. The resulting project 'Breathing in; Time out' explores the whole operation of the site and not only expresses this in visual interventions at the site itself but proposes a virtual meeting place via a website, www.breathing-in.org
Follow this link to the CBAT website to download the full paper in Adobe Acrobat Format.
