If paradise is half as nice #3

Posted on September 9, 2014 by Ties Ten Bosch

From the 6th of august till the 7th of september 2014 I spend my time working in Leipzig. Together with Willem Besselink, Pim Palsgraaf, Daan Botlek, Regina Kelaita and Bram Braam, I used an old empty factory building to make site specific works in order to present this during the ‘Tag für Industrie Kultur Leipzig’. Parallel to this presentation we had a small show at Post-Industriale as a teaser for our factory show as well.

Leipzig has many empty factory buildings that have fallen into ruins during the last25 years. In the project ‘If paradise is half as nice’ we use these buildings to give input to our work and use the possibility to create work that we normally can’t create in our studios. We chose an old grain storage as the location for this year’s edition after spending one week visiting many of these empty buildings.

Entering the building I immediately fell for the tunnel that was situated on the lowest part of the building. After one day I decided what intervention to do here and started to paint both side walls completely white. This resulted in a double photo work with the title ‘Parallel Encounters’ (photo’s made by Regina Kelaita, for which my thanks).

A second work presented during this project was a performance under the title ‘Holier than thou’, of which the result will be presented in the oktober edition of the Rotterdam based art magazine Puntkomma. Therefor I will keep the pictures of this performance out of this article for now.

This project was a very intense working period. Not only because we stayed with six artists in a two room apartment, but also because we had the possibility to be witness of each others working process. This resulted in debates about each others work and a critical eye from good colleagues. An opportunity you don’t get a lot while working in your studio.