DESIGNED QUESTIONS.
Krijn Christiaansen and Wim Cuyvers have known each other since 1998. They met at the Eindhoven Design Academy, where WC was a teacher and KC was a student at the ‘Environment’ department, later known by the much more correct name of ‘Public Space’. During the study, but also later, they often worked in the same cities (Sarajevo, Belgrade, Bucharest....)
Taking a closer look at the proposals KC makes, at the things he creates, it is striking that he actually never gives answers to questions being asked him: the designs are rather “translations” of the question asked him. He ‘shapes’ the question, designs the question instead of answering it by means of the design. By this we don’t just mean to say that his proposals remain ‘questions’, rather than being ‘answers’, but also that they are ‘design’, that they make use of design logic, -methodology, not of ‘art’ –methodology. His proposals are ‘designed’ questions.
The various designs can be put together, they easily converge in a ‘catalogue’, together they ‘speak’, forming something which is the opposite of a theory; from the very early designs from his student days up till the very latest actions and proposals for Jogjakarta.
KC develops while doing. Very often the proposals are for specific environmental surroundings. Nearly always he has walked around there, very physically, sporting (skeelering, jogging, cycling) at times, making an inventory at other times. During these tours he easily gets into contact with people and places; these people and places tell him stories; he notes them down, remembers them; but he also often finds ‘objects’ on these tours, strange, uncommon, specific things, always made by man, not generated by nature, but man-made implements; often rather informal, with inventive improper use of materials, abounding in the surroundings he walks through, but to which he has a special sensitivity - a good eye. KC is engaged in a (design) practice. In that (design) practice different ‘steps’ are equally important; the period of walking around on the ‘grounds’, the physical contact with people, making an inventory in notebooks, where stories, photographs, sketches come together, the physical creation of ‘designs’, the contact with executors, with special techniques, sometimes very local, sometimes currently technical, sometimes using very traditional methods and often also the registration (videos, photographs) of the use of the developed ‘object’ in its surrounding.Those films make the relatively restricted importance of the objects quite clear: they get a role that does not surpass that of the artists, the surrounding, the music that is constantly played at that moment, the designed object merges into the physically analysed surroundings. He doesn’t work starting from a previously developed and written out theory: the working is a practice (which at the same time relativizes the importance of the designed objects and relates them to the surroundings, the artists, the making processes, etc.)
It is easy for KC to accept the ‘designcondition’. He knows thinking is a must, he knows that he has to develop himself by means of projects: from one project to the other. He knows he has to understand the local condition. But he also knows that his understanding can but reach to a relatively simple level: the insights he can acquire during the course of the relatively short-term project. From the walks, the talks to people he meets and looks up, from what he has read or seen he has gradually developed a story, that story not being reality, but a reduction of reality, overfocussing on particular aspects (history, poltics, social....). By joining those few insights a ‘workable’ translation of reality comes into existence, a reality in which the objects he designs find back their places and of which the video films he makes are a reflection or a projection.
At some time we both quoted Flaubert: ‘I can but enjoy nature through my window’. To Krijn that means that the actual Dutch condition always plays an essential role in designing- processes. The Netherlands are no longer a country of thrifty, functional and collective, systematic (free)thinking. At the beginning of the 21st century the Netherlands are a country of excessive subsidies, of fearful searching for individuality and rising individualism.That given will have to do for KC: the questions which are asked him often come from (over)subsidized art- and design institutions (with their typical communication strategies). Even the fact that there is room for comment on that given, by means of the works, is very Dutch. KC is fully aware of the mechanisms of recuperation which are active in the cultural field. He fears cynicism.
Wim Cuyvers, mei 2008
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