15–16 December 2010, 10:00–18:00 / Utrecht and Puttershoek
Please note the change of the date due to the circumstances of the senior participants. For further information on participating in this ACTION, please contact Yolande van der Heide.
Artist Katerina Šedá often collaborates with specific groups of people to create rules for games or instructions in order to realize new forms of collective agency. Although seemingly authoritative and absurd, the rules are often developed in a process of conversation with the residents/ participants and mutually constituted as a device to “act together.” For User’s Manual: The Grand Domestic Revolution, Katerina engages a neighborhood in a Dutch town called Puttershoek, in which a new quarter is being renewed, consisting of a retirement home, pre-school, apartments among other facilities, towards the “official” goal of bringing together young and old generations of people. Although the development has increased the amount of private space in these structures, the relationships between residents are steadily receding.
Katerina, along with the Puttershoek residents and workers, problematise the “renewed” structures – which they find impersonal, isolating and enclosing in their aesthetic and functional dimensions – and will conceive of ways to respond to this condition over the year. The first action in this process will assemble the senior residents of this district with helpers from Utrecht in Puttershoek, forming a “common concentration,” to plan an intervention that renegotiates the social spatial agency that previously existed in the old structures, with the new design.
