| Like many others, Erica van Loon, one of my fellow artists at Kaap 2011, took some flowers home too. |
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Nous ne notons pas les fleurs, Fort Ruigenhoek (2011) is commissioned by Kaap 2011/Stichting Storm. Photo courtesy of Erica van Loon. |
| It was the fifth weekend of Kaap 2011. I was quite curious to know how my work, Nous ne notons pas les fleurs, Fort Ruigenhoek, has grown. The work is a process-based installation of growing flowers in the shape of the world map, taken care by the audience, and recorded continuously with a 24-hours security camera. In the fifth weekend, the weekend before the closing week, I went back to the Fort Ruigenhoek to give the flowers away. |
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Kaap started as a biennial for children. Now it’s not a biennial anymore, but it’s still geared pretty much towards children.
I was here for the opening, but didn’t get the chance to take a picture of their pirate flag. This time, I did. |
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| As I walked to my site I realized the Stinging Nettles have grown quite a lot. I can still see my watchtower, though, in the background. |
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| I discovered that the production team, Mark, Frank and all the wizards, has built some kind of an underground system for watering the plants. It’s wonderful. |
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| In the control room, I found a lot of new friends. The spiders! They were not there when I left the last time, after the opening of the exhibition. I wonder where they were hiding. |
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| This is something that I didn’t think of before. When the team told me about the changes that were happening in the work, of course they sounded really obvious. But honestly when I worked with Google SketchUp in my computer, thinking about the work and planning on what it will be like and what it will grow into, this kind of things didn’t really occur to me. This feels great – to see something you think as your own creation, working somewhat out of your control, creating life of its own. Maybe this is what having kids can feel like. |
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| And as part of just the simplest course of life, America totally became a wild wild grassland. |
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| The plan was to devise some kind of a competitive game where the winners can take the flowers home. When I arrived at the site, however, I thought making a game didn’t make sense. It would just add yet another layer that I felt was not necessary. So I just started to talk to the audience and tell them that they can get any flowerpots they want and take care of them at home. |
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| This is another example of how the work has been growing. I saw this for the first time when I was preparing the work: the site became a recreation ground for insects. Butterflies and bees were ecstatic. They just couldn’t get away. I was so happy. |
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| A toddler came, and of course the ‘world map’ didn’t mean anything to her. Her parents were just walking behind her, and sat to watch her. She picked up a flowerpot, took it to her dad, and made him smell it. |
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| She did this repeatedly, with different flowers. And also with her mum. When she finally got bored of it, she started picking up the flowerpots, taking them away to a bench nearby, and leaving them there to pick up a new one. And so on. She had so much fun, I did too. |
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| It was not easy to decide which flowers to take home. |
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| Being there was worth it. It enabled me to play more with some of the audience. Some people decided to mix the colours again. |
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| I suggested trying to build a red line across Asia, but while we were doing it someone else was sneakily making a yellow line across America, and the yellow line was much more visible in the camera. |
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| This is what Egypt looked like. The wild purple flowers were victorious. |
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| The next day, America was almost gone. |
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| One of the kids reminded me of Le Petit Prince himself. |
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| And funnily contextual enough, I discovered a few mole holes beneath the pots. |
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| The Busy Lizzies were all eaten away by slugs. |
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| The slugs apparently only came out at night. |
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| At the end of the day, we moved the rest of the flowers that were not taken home by the visitors to the nearby bench, leaving the wild long grass marking where the continents used to be. |
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| A little bit further away I discovered where the moles might have been coming from. |
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| Without the flowerpots, the slugs and the worms were exposed. This invited a different kind of visitors. |
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| The security camera in the watchtower kept recording. |
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Nous ne notons pas les fleurs, Fort Ruigenhoek is commissioned by Kaap 2011/Stichting Storm. Images courtesy of the artist and of Alexander Fasel/Stichting Storm |
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I was told that Kaap, in Dutch, means something like pirating, hacking a place. So here are some photos from the opening of Kaap 2011, where the audience started hacking the fort, and populating my world. |
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All images courtesy of the artist. Nous ne notons pas les fleurs, Fort Ruigenhoek is commissioned by Kaap 2011/Stichting Storm. |
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Nous ne notons pas les fleurs, Fort Ruigenhoek will open today.
This piece is part of the Nous ne notons pas les fleurs cycle that began in 2009. So far I have done one in Patna, one in Jakarta, one in Singapore and this one in Fort Ruigenhoek. Each time it is different depending on the locale and what is possible to do. And of course each time it is also different because it depends very much on the people that are involved in the whole work. This time, in Fort Ruigenhoek, I’m using live flowering plants. And instead of recording it for only several days like the previous works, I will record a whole 6 weeks of it. This is what it looked like when I left it the day before the opening. |
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| A hose going through the grass. |
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| A watchtower peeking in a distance. |
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| The world in its pristine colours. |
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| In the bunker the control room and the public monitor is ready to go. |
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| During the opening, children and their parents will put the pots in place. Red on red, blue on blue, white on white, yellow on yellow, and orange on orange. |
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| These colours were based on the Olympic logo, but instead of black I use white for Africa because I thought black wouldn’t go well on green. |
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| I wish I had a better picture of the watchtower. In this it’s a bit too dark and you can’t see America. In reality, from certain angles the red is clearly visible, but not always. |
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| Three continents – where did they meet? |
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| The public monitor is ready. People can see what has been recorded earlier in the day through this monitor. |
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| During visits we are recording 1 frame every 1 second, and otherwise it’s 1 frame every 30 seconds. |
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The three binoculars hanging on the back wall are for looking back at the monitor in the watchtower.
And all the maintenance tools – softwares, hardwares and handwares – are in the control room. |
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Nous ne notons pas les fleurs, Fort Ruigenhoek (2011) is commissioned by Kaap 2011/Stichting Storm. Kaap 2011 is curated by Tiong Ang.
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| News from the toy factory of Kaap! |
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| Before I came, Mark the Wizard of wizards has set up a painting factory. Nadine and other volunteer wizards have painted lots of the pots, and the saucers too. |
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| So when Eric picked me up in the airport and drove me to the fort, they have almost finished painting all these Italian pots … |
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| … and saucers. |
| Nadine turned out to be an earth wizard. She studied for three years to be a florist. |
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| So under her supervision we set up a potting factory. |
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| We potted and potted and potted. |
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| When the pots were ready we put them on the ground. |
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| The flowers spread magic. |
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| The magic invited all kinds of insects. |
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| Not only this ecstatic butterfly, but also ecstatic bumblebees. |
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| And I had the curse of the pollen. |
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| Tiong also came to help. He helped with a bit of potting, and a bit of deflowering. |
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| And we had to store the flowerpots inside one of the bunkers because there were four sheep eyeing them. |
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| Four sheep! Imagine what the little prince will say. He would want the sheep in a cardboard box. |
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| But instead, we put the flowers in a cardboard box. |
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| The next day I started putting the saucers on the ground. |
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| When I got to China, I realized we were missing 51 yellow saucers. |
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| So Sebastian came and painted 51 saucers in yellow, and left it out to dry. |
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| At the end of the day I was almost completed the world. |
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| And the Wizard said, let us rest. |
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| I realized I haven’t seen fire in such a long time. |
| Thanks to Mark vd Ham, Frank vd Horst, Eric, Nadine, Sebastian. Image of the painting factory courtesy of Mark vd Ham. Nous ne notons pas les fleurs, Fort Ruigenhoek is commissioned by Kaap 2011/Stichting Storm. Kaap 2011 is curated by Tiong Ang. |
| I have been working with the wonderful wizards of Kaap for a while to prepare this work. The exhibition will open on 29 May and will be on for about 6 good weeks. |
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| This is the site where my work is going to be. |
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| And this is the plan. |
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| Wish us luck! |
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Thanks to Tiong Ang, Petra Blok, Mark van de Ham, Frank van de Horst, Rozemarijn Gerritsen, Hester Wolters, Gouke Hilte, and Lotte Kraaijeveld. Photos of the site courtesy of Tiong Ang and Mark van de Ham. |
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| Tintin Wulia: Deconstruction of a Wall, solo show at Ark Galerie, Jakarta. Curated by Alia Swastika. Thanks to Ronald Akili, Jason Gunawan, Putri Ayu. Photos courtesy of the artist, which is me. |
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Out of the different kinds of realities, what I prefer is rarely the truth. |
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Installation sketch for Nous ne notons pas les fleurs, Jakarta (2010).
Nous ne notons pas les fleurs is a cycle of multi-form works exploring the ideas of mobility and the impermanence of political borders in contrast to the tendency to freeze them. The title of this cycle, Nous ne notons pas les fleurs, is taken from a dialogue in Le Petit Prince (de Saint-Exupéry, 1943), where a geographer tells the Little Prince that geographers do not record flowers because, unlike the earth, flowers are ephemeral. Nous ne notons pas les fleurs, Jakarta (2010) is made with support from Potato Head and Ark Galerie. Thanks to Emmelyn Gunawan, Alia Swastika, Varadila Nurdin, Jefry Budi Mardianto, Gintani Nur Apresia Swastika, Elia Nurvista, Katherina Allo, Zakiah, and all participants. The work is in progress and will be shown at Ark Galerie, Jakarta, in September. Please email me to receive an update. |
| In Jakarta, it started like this. |
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| And ended like this. |
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Stills from Nous ne notons pas les fleurs, Jakarta (2010).
Thanks to Potato Head, Ark Galerie, Emmelyn Gunawan, Alia Swastika, Varadila Nurdin, Jefry Budiman, Gintani Nur Apresia Swastika, Elia Nurvista, Katherina Allo, Zakiah, and all participants. The video is being edited and will be shown at Ark Galerie in September. Please email me to receive an update. |
When she was thirteen, Tintin Wulia wished that Peter Pan would lose his shadow in her neighborhood, because she thought that Peter Pan was kinda sexy. Night after night, she would think a happy thought, wishing that Peter would find her if she could fly. Nothing happened – Tintin discovered that Peter had much preferred Wendy.
Two decades and almost seven years later, Tintin is still discovering many things. One, that Peter Pan is a fictional character invented by James Matthew Barrie. Two, that the fact that Peter is fictional doesn’t mean that he’s illusory. She is also discovering that, three, it is not a happy thought that one needs to be able to fly – it is, rather, the combination of a passport and a valid visa. And also, four, that the fact that one needs a passport and a valid visa to be able to fly is just shitty.
