Pitching with a shopping net from the Albert Cuyp market

To highlight the 10th anniversary of the Griffioen cultural center at Uilenstede in Amstelveen, both inside and outside the building, I was asked to come up with an idea. Due to the concert hall's acoustics, drilling and screwing inside the building wasn't feasible. We needed other solutions to secure anything.

How do you imagine a place where 10 years of theater, concerts, and all sorts of other activities took place? A photo I took of a fence in Paris, where remnants of posters were stuck with bits of tape, turned out to be a good metaphor for all those performances, of which only memories and fragments remained.

My sketch design consisted of a black Albert Cuyp Market shopping net, into which I tied some strips of colored plastic from shopping bags. The idea was to wrap the entire exterior of the theater hall in nets, knotting colored plastic strips and colored pieces of filtering material for the theater spotlights.

Searching for solutions, we soon found ourselves in fishing ports. There, we found suitable nets that were also fire-resistant. Griffioen employees collected plastic bags, cut them into strips, and woven them into the nets late into the night.

The big day arrived. Downstairs, we had curb stones to secure the structure to the building. Up on the roof, they were fiddling around with ropes. The nets were dragged outside. The weather was beautiful and there was little wind. In no time, the building was wrapped up.


For the foyer, I reimagined Ad's cabinet of curiosities, the then-director, using props, texts from the light booth, and a sound tape with excerpts from performances. An exhibition of posters was displayed on the high windows of the entrance, and photos of performances lined the walls. Outside, in the display cases near the entrance, excerpts from the book in the dressing rooms, in which visiting artists had written, were hung.

The collaboration was great.
It resulted in a broad, colorful, recycled palette of impressions.