Lost
Just walking about town, I start noticing these posters around.
Simple flourescent things, written in felt-tip pen, tied to lamposts and bridges with string.
Lovely, improvised things, that attract my attention far easier than any swanky professional marketing poster could.
Marketing ennui. We all suffer from it. That ability to just shut out the barrage of images that charge towards us day after day from every possible media.
Perhaps this is just a new ploy then? That’s what I think at first when that flourescent glare hits me from a distance.
Some media type has decided on a grafitti campaign that oozes “street cred” as envisioned by some suits in a glass and steel office complex someplace…..
But no…. I approach it and can read it now.
Gee.Is someone lost in the city? It happens a lot. Too many drugs, too much freedom.
Every summer I turn on the local news and someone has always fallen in the canal and died (for some reason they are mostly English – go figure).
What’s going on?
Turns out it’s the squatters in one of the last remaining unconverted warehouses in Amsterdam. They are advertising their exhibition.
Of late they have been at loggerheads with the local council who wanted to turn their beautiful free space into some heterogenous, bland office and apartment complex.
We have enough of those already. Finally, as far as I can tell, a compromise of sorts was reached.
The warehouse will be converted, but it will also contain a cafe and artists studios …..whether this artistic space will remain true to the free squatter ethos that presently resides there remains to be seen, but at least they’re not knocking it down…..
