IndyMedia - Vrij Media Centrum Nederland

Waar: Amsterdam, Netherlands
Wanneer: 30/11/2020 - 23:15

A banner has been put up on the tiny house (An art work by Leonard van Munster "Nail House",)on the empty field next to Paradiso. This creative intervention appears to have been done to call out artists that adopt the struggle against redevelopment and gentrification while really contributing to the issue.

The following text is attached to the gate:
Nail House 2.0

SOME HOMELESS KIDS

In the middle of this undeveloped site, some homeless kids imagine a space of possibility. We imagine a community garden, a place where we could live, play, and be together. A tiny banner hangs from one of the windows of the nail house that reads: “Wat niet past, kan nog steeds” (“What doesn’t fit, is still possible”. A play on the slogan “wat niet mag, kan nog steeds”(what is not allowed, is still possible”) used by the squatting movement after the 2010 squatting ban.

The work aims to start a conversation with the artist, to encourage van Munster to reimagine and relocate the struggle of resistance against gentrification and redevelopment to allow it to be more specific to Amsterdam. After one of Munster’s Artworks was squatted in 2017, Munster suggested in an At5 interview, that he would rent it out on Airbnb after the squatters were evicted. Nail house 2.0 aims to take into question the appropriation of resistance elsewhere in the name of art while simultaneously contributing to the problem here. It aims to start a conversation about the often uncomfortably close relationship that exists between art, gentrification, and squatting (esp. broedplaatsen).

Nail House 2.0 is also a call to action and an invitation to the public: Squat this land, squat this house, squat the world.