In collaboration with the Rijksakademie, artists Antonio Vega Macotela (RA 11/12), Omar Vega Macotela (RA 11/20) and urban experimentalist Gabriella Gómez-Mont were part of an off-site residence program in one of the houses abutting the Oude Kerk, at different moments, from January 2020 to December 2021.
In their Red Door Project – which refers to the red door of the house – they have each taken Oude Kerk as epicenter and starting point, discussing amongst themselves and also exploring individually and with others new ways of imagining and reuniting in a post-pandemic and racialized world.
With Amsterdam as its backdrop, The Red Door Project allowed them to explore how art spills over into other areas of knowledge, influencing urban and social reality in different ways, connecting to other actors and spheres in the city and beyond.
Rather than answers, the times at hand demanded searching through different points of departure.
How
will we
meet again?
There is no need to stress that the months we have spent caught between the waves of a global pandemic have been tumultuous and unexpected. A few lines of the genetic code that make up COVID-19 have changed the world.
So we start from this axiom: the ideation and proposal of new forms of interaction should always be a community creation and not a structure imposed from outside. Thus inquiry becomes emergent, hybrid, a multilayered exploration of hyper-local and subjective spaces that gives way to larger, more universal insights into social, urban, political, cultural and aesthetic principles and structures – then back again, in continuous loops, traveling the scales of a body-city-planet-space.
We believe that this dynamic and interdependent process can be an artistic gesture in and of itself, as long as it carries out the poetic expansion of language (affective or social for example), creating new meanings through said expansion. We believe that art belongs and connects with the world, just as cells connect to form tissues, which subsequently do the same to create organs and bodies – both individual and social bodies, bodies invisibly overflowing into each other.
In this global quarantine and its aftermath our ways to approach and relate to others have changed. Our configurations of intimacy and belonging are shifting still, and a fundamental question becomes urgent: how will we meet again?
Antonio Vega Macotela – Mentorship with Rijksakademie Residents + Sobremesas —– (content coming soon)
Omar Vega Macotela – The HDC Institute (Health, Disease and Criminality Institute) —– (content coming soon)
Gabriella Gómez-Mont – Education from below: a year-long series of transdisciplinary conversation at different scales and tempos —— (click here to explore)
