International Exchanges at Home

The streets are busier despite the colder weather as QueenB and I discovered during her four day trip here to the Netherlands. As some of you may remember, I visited QueenB in Poland back in November and now it was her turn to come and visit me. We had a wonderful time strolling through Amsterdam, Delft, Den Haag, and Rotterdam and we made the most of our four days by visiting churches, museums, libraries, markets, cloisters, shopping districts, and harbours. We documented all of it by taking oodles of pictures of canals, historic buildings, canals, monuments, canals, some canals, and a couple more canals. If I never see a canal again...just kidding. It was a whirlwind visit which I labelled 'vacation time' in my agenda but I couldn't help but learn some new things about my project.

On the first day, QueenB and I met up with some of her Dutch colleagues here in the Netherlands. QueenB had met these colleagues through their work in Poland when she helped them navigate through the wilds of her own field site for a couple of days. The perspective of these colleagues was quite intriguing and new to me since they were both photographers and looked at space and place solely from a visual standpoint but whose projects included a social twist. Not only did I learn about the importance of depth when taking a picture along with some other technical “know-how” (including how to fast-walk while holding a ladder); I also learned some very interesting ideas about the creation of physical space here in Rotterdam.

As 'The Lens' said (and I do not quote him directly since this discussion took place over rose bier in a bruin cafe): Space in Rotterdam is typically renovated at a faster pace than other city spaces in the Netherlands because there is less history of, and thus less connection to, the landscape. The Lens was initially referring to the fact that the Dutch create land out of nothing through their polders which is reclaiming land from the sea. However, this discussion moved into the politics of city place and specifically to Rotterdam.

Rotterdam's landscape (here I mean buildings, skylines, waterways, and areas dedicated to nature) was levelled after bombs were dropped on its city centre during the Second World War. After the war, instead of re-creating the buildings that were destroyed, city-planners decided to build the city anew starting with streets and continuing into its buildings. Thus, the physical history of Rotterdam before the war, while not lost, is not always visible today. Following this, there is less stress placed on the preservation of the physical aspects of Rotterdam and more emphasis put on the constant betterment of city workings (vehicle and pedestrian transportation, waterways, economic pathways). This is not to say that there are no historical heritage projects here in Rotterdam, in fact those buildings that predate the war and such projects like the Hofplein lijn are quite furiously defended, but that space here in Rotterdam is somewhat more flexible and can be seen as an open-palette with which to make and re-make, create and re-create, to no end. I myself have noticed the constant rebuilding and upgrading processes here in Rotterdam and marvelled at the different levels of instigation over change to physical aspects of space and was happy to see my thoughts supported by others.

It was truly an international exchange of some sort in my home space. What a fruitful vacation!