Future Skin of the City

Marjolijn Boterenbrood

Marjolijn Boterenbrood is a multidisciplinary artist whose works primarily revolve around the concepts of space and places through sensory impressions. Boterenbrood works through these subjects to reveal the hidden intrinsic aspects of the certain places that she visits. Through this, the places can be fully understood through the different dimensions that have been accentuated in Boterenbrood’s works.

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Logbook

A log tells of time and space: “A navigation instrument with which the speed or distance traveled by a vessel is determined (or both). An important instrument for establishing a ‘dead reckoning/gegist bestek’ in dutch. Dead reckoning - what am I going to do at Mediamatic?

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Winter

January 10
It starts well. It’s snowing, it’s freezing, fog and there is ice. Water in its other form. Everything frozen except the Oosterdok; there was too much wind there.

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January 12
Foggy, poor visibility, my father would say. All the rolls of fabric and drawings are taken to the Dijksgracht/Oosterdokskade. Still fog. In the greenhouse at the Oosterdok it feels as if I’m on a ship, at sea looking out over a shimmering surface without a horizon. It almost moves. What is beneath me? At sea you also don’t see what lives below this surface.

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January 14
09:04 winter sunrise. Still, no wind. Dew-covered windows catch the blinking patterns. In the greenhouse it already becomes frighteningly warm. Short day, sunset at 16:48. Pink water. The sun’s arc describes only just over a quarter of the horizon around.

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January 16
In the sluice-gate barn it is just as cold as outside. The low light flickers and sparkles through it.

January 20
Jolanda Verspagen, phytoplankton ecologist at the University of Amsterdam, is the “speaker for the living” at Mediamatic. She wants to evoke empathy for non-human life. She saw my drawings of diatoms but immediately noted that I was mixing all sorts of things together. If I were to call it plankton, it would be correct. Zoé, Dewi, and Puk from Mediamatic filmed the underwater work, with beautiful green light.

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January 26
Silver gleams the sluggish, ice-cold water. The attachment of my encrusting metal plates works itself loose from the rotten wooden fender. Repairs with Jeroen.

January 28
Works hung in the barn.

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January 29
Surrounded by blinding white: snow. White is the colour with which one makes offerings at a spring or a mountain pass or other sacred places, in the Altai in Siberia: milk, ayran, butter or kumis (fermented mare’s milk).