Metro54 @ Framer Framed – A Funeral For Street Culture (2021)

Installation view, photo by Eva Broekema

Installation view for Jean Paul Paula, photo by Eva Broekema

Installation view for Kenneth Aidoo, photo by Eva Broekema

Previous / Next

/

With Jelmer Teunissen. Spatial Design for Group Exhibition (Sculptures, Photography, Video, Performances) + Talk on design + Zine workshop for the Metro54 exhibition and programme ‘A Funeral For Street Culture’ at Framer Framed, Amsterdam

Selected reviews / coverage
Samenkomen op Straat – Metropolis M

This project departed from the wish to reuse the materials from the previous Framer Framed exhibition designed by Studio LA (From what will we reassemble ourselves). This directed much of the following interventions. As a material language we stuck with the thematic of the ‘construction site’, its aesthetics circulating in spatial designs/installations/fashion stores and its workwear equally commodified in the fashion industry.

Spatial statement:

If we are gathering for A Funeral for Street Culture (capitalized), we must ask in return: which spaces are we, our bodies, souls, our histories, holding together? Which street cultures are we mourning, for whom are we pouring one out, when we contain a multitude of mourning and celebration?

Departing from the multiplicity found in contemporary street-culture, we propose to narrate and spatialize the outsider-insider within. The street is as fragmented as the street cultures it provides space to. The street however also binds together a multiplicity of facades along a physical timescape. The cycles of capitalist cultural systems around street culture, those that can be commodified and value can be extracted from, are fast. In a rapid succession, signs and materials are appropriated, re-used, invented, recombined. In these different modes of occupation, (how) is the street able to counter appropriation and displacement? Can we give credit where it’s due while maintaining institutional street cred? In this collective space, we locate erasures, enclosures, and vantage points in order to reflect on what we are putting on a pedestal. What are we offering a stage and therefore: what institution are we staging?

Destabilizing grids

Plan placement works

Plan drawing routing AFFSC

Previous / Next

/

While using the space of a funeral as a metaphor, are we celebrating a rebirth, a resistance, or is street culture altogether already dead? We urge to take a walk with us, halt, rethink in multiple timelines, pause, and mourn. We implore to come together in joy and celebration, as an affirmation of our ability to hold space.

In this, we propose a non-hierarchical spatiality to afford the interlocking (his-her-they)stories of street culture/appropriation. The narration of our space collects itself around overlapping spatialities, accommodating multiple viewpoints that depart from a collective interior of being-together. The intersections create in themselves border conditions, referencing and absorbing each other in diffuse, proliferating ways. This narrative is built up out of a grammar of tools and surfaces, unfolding over different levels, suggesting affordances for viewing differently.