Flux Flying Flower Show | Programme | Flux/S - Drafts Establishing Future

Flux Flying Flower Show photo shoot by Ari Versluis (Exactitudes): 
Thursday September 9th, opening
Saturday September 11th, 14:00 - 17:00 and 19:00 - 21:00
Sunday September 12th, 14:00 - 17:00 and 19:00 - 21:00

For the first edition of Flux/S, the artist Frank Bruggeman and landscape architect Ernst van der Hoeven designed Dahlia Drive, a meandering landscape of continuously flowering dahlias along one of the avenues surrounding the Natlab. Using various varieties of this outstanding example of a working-man's flower, a small, colourful oasis sprang up between the diggers, excavations and piles of sand. This gave temporary shape to the universal human craving for nature in the midst of urban architecture. And also perhaps to our yearning for human dimensions.

 

This year they have joined forces with the artist Eric Roelen to allow us a provocative preview of the perception and annexation of nature by those who, over the next few years, will create their habitat at Strijp S. Using a space-filling installation, they will confront the power and beauty of nature with the way in which man appropriates it time after time. There is more to this than just the issue of the boundary between the individual and a sense of community. Flux Flying Flower Show adds a certain sharpness, particularly to the discord between our admiration and cherishing of nature on the one hand, and the ultimate cultivation of it on the other. With reference to such public events as the English Chelsea Flower Show and the Dutch flower parades, the makers - albeit not outside but inside the walls of Flux/S - hone in on the area of tension between tradition, organic growth and populist sensationalism, with a sharp sense of surrealism. The artists appear to be arguing that where man becomes overly present, sublimation will eventually turn against itself.

 

Visitors to Flux/S will either be able to physically experience this or will try to parry it. The Pumpkin Arena, an airy stand constructed as a showcase for an abundance of  varieties of pumpkin, not only calls into question the dreadfully cosily designed Dutch front garden and the Dutch urge for decoration that foreigners find so hard to understand. The pumpkin, once an out-dated, archaic vegetable, has since been promoted to all-round bourgeois heritage. In the Flower Photoshoot, the visitor can have his photo taken next to a bouquet of late-summer flowers. The immortalization of this transitory moment is just as much a well-received declaration of love for the simplicity of the gladiolus, sunflower or dahlia as proof of the inherently human yearning to identify, if only for a moment, with natural richness. But where does our experience of nature actually have a liberating effect? In Flying Flower Show, large quantities of pot plants vie for the chance to experience their one minute of fame. They fly through the air in a whimsical manner, where they are photographed at their most gravity-free moment. Flux Flying Flower Show not only incorporates the stillness of ultimate spiritual momentum, the enjoyment of a shooting gallery at the funfair, and the calculation of the probability of a scientific experiment, but also, a brutal disregard for the natural life cycle. This is where Bruggeman, Van der Hoeven and Roelen settle the score with more than a side effect of local Volksempfinden. We have been warned.

 

The artist Frank Bruggeman (Rotterdam, 1966) and the landscape architect Ernst van der Hoeven (Amsterdam, 1965) have a keen and sensitive eye for remarkable green in the city. Together with graphic designer Ben Laloua, they are creating a journal about this: Club Donny (www.clubdonny.com), a “Strictly unedited journal on the personal experience of nature in the urban environment.” It is a mainly visual publication, unfettered, with the most beautiful (amateur) photographs that represent the “individual perception of nature in the urban environment”. In September of  last year, working with the artist Eric Roelen, who is also searching for a different view on city life, they hunted around Eindhoven on the lookout  for unique green places for GroundAbout, a joint project commissioned by MU.

 

frankbruggeman.com

ernstvanderhoeven.com

ericroelen.nl 

 

 

Flux Flying Flower Show will be presented in collaboration with MU