Architecture of Goodbye: an Ode to Posterity (Exhibition Review)

I went to Laurel Project Space's Architecture of Goodbye: an Ode to Posterity at Kamerlingh Onneslaan 1 in Amsterdam on Friday, 19th November 2021. The exhibition, curated by Jean-Michel Mabruki Mussa, showed works by artists Elena Giolo, Birna Björnsdóttir, Rosa Stil, Ossip Blits, Andreas Tegnander, Emiel Zeno and Sophie Wright. 

 

I pushed through a heavy, dark wooden door framed by large grey stones. Above the door, a sign showed the word "Telefoondienst" in glimmering yellow metallic letters. Inside, to my right, I found a spiral stone staircase and walked up the second floor. There was a large room filled with people. The floor was streaked with filled-up holes and taped down electric wires. Parallel concrete poles in the middle of the room seemed to hold together the building. Suspended wide copper circles slowly and cryptically spun in between these poles. Ossip Blits and Andreas Tegnander used materials they found in the building to install "Eight coils of copper". I could hear a faint sound, a vibrating metallic clunk, below the people's chatter. 

 

Somewhere on the floor, there was an around 10 cm-wide hole. Artist Birna Björnsdótti stood right in front of it. She spent half of the night making sure no one's foot would slip through. Her artwork "All these elephants", situated nearby, connected a near transparent and resin-like cloud-shaped sculpture mounted on a metal rod to electrical wires that travelled all the way down to the basement (through the hole). In between performances, I walked there and found a dark and bare concrete space, with humidity on the walls and sizzling light bulbs. I didn't stay long, but I heard a strange rugged metallic noise — maybe the building's hum. 

 

Architecture of Goodbye: an Ode to Posterity is, as its title indicates, an adieu to the insides of Kamerlingh Onneslaan 1. The building, which had been home to artist studios and exhibition space for the collective Laurel Project Space since August 2020, is now scheduled for an urban renewal project. 

 

Kamerlingh Onneslaan 1, designed in 1923 by Albert Boeken, used to be a telephone exchange (a central office interconnecting telephone calls between subscribers). Curator Mabruki Mussa's unique reaction to the destruction of a part of the building's long history is to honour its original purpose with sound. The works are nods, at once delicate and industrial, touches, leaving room for the building itself to speak. The sounds they emit are omnipresent, yet almost inaudible. After being used by many people for more than eighty years, the chaotic floors and concrete poles needed a bit of respite, a soothing goodbye before a rutilant and boasting urban revamping will destroy them. 

 

Kamerlingh Onneslaan 1 is one of the many alternative "intercalary" places vital to the Amsterdam art scene. But only the exterior of the building is protected by the city. So Mabruki Mussa's farewell, using sound to image space, honours the insides of a building central to Amsterdam's history. While I don't look forward to seeing what Kamerlingh Onneslaan 1 will look like in a year or two, I can't wait to see what Jean-Michel Mabruki Mussa is up to.