LPE: February 21, 2007
Lecture titled Outside Collaborations by Jeanne van Heeswijk
For me as an artist working represents far more than a material body of artworks that can be given a permanent place in a museum. Working is also not exclusively bound to authorship and its merit surpasses that of commercial exchange and objective worth. It rather refers to the thoughts and ideas that artists stand for and the ways in which their mentalities are given form in collective manifestos, interventions, performances and, sometimes, products. This concept of working is closer to the notion of cultural capital: an abundance of new norms, values and meanings which artists develop by working together and which they endeavour to test by laying links to the lived reality. However, I not only want to make this capital accessible to other artists and art lovers, but
also to various groups of people within a complex, multicultural society. In so doing, I grasp every opportunity to demonstrate that no one has monopoly over this capital.
Jeanne van Heeswijk.
Jeanne van Heeswijk (1965, Schijndel, the Netherlands) is a visual artist who creates contexts for interaction in public spaces. Her projects are distinguished by a strong social involvement. With her work van Heeswijk stimulates and develops cultural production and creates new public (meeting) spaces or remodels existing ones. To achieve this, she often works closely with artists, designers, architects, software developers, governments and citizens. Projects for public spaces included: Valley Vibes, the vibe detector that assisted Chora in mapping East London; De Strip, a lively cultural zone within a former shopping area in Vlaardingen; Face Your World, an interactivecomputer game that makes kids look critically on their own environment;
The Blue House, a cultural refuge intervening with the history of a community on a newly-built housing island. She regularly lectures on topics such as urban renewal, participation and cultural production. Her work is widely exhibited at various venues such as: Witte de With, Rotterdam; PS1 Center for Contemporary Art, New York; Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Tokyo; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Tapei Biennale, Tapei; Kunsthalle Brandts, Odense; Bushan Biennale, Korea. In 2003 van Heeswijk was one of the artists in the Dutch pavilion at the Venice Biennale. She has received the Europrix, the Chabot and the MamaCash prize for her work so far.
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