MATTHIJS BOSMAN: A MOMENT OF GREAT CHANGE IS MY STAGE

Matthijs Bosman (Eindhoven, 1976) is an artist with society as his canvas. He is often called in when two parties are on opposite sides. It is up to him to creatively forge a bridge between the two. "I am the link that tries to uncover passion in everyone's convictions in a dedicated and honest way."

Text: Bart-Jan Brouwer | Online Editor: Natasha Hendriks
Image: John van Helvert

You went to drama school first, then art school, and later you stuck another year at the Academy of Architecture and Urban Planning. What does that say about the shift in your interest?

"In terms of medium, my interests have shifted, but I have always continued to create. At drama school in Maastricht, I quickly switched from acting to directing. I don't really understand why I was ever accepted for the acting course there. I found actors to be special people with whom I could not work well at all. I didn't get happy on stage, rather nervous. Until I was introduced to directing. I found that interesting, because it is about the study of the meaning of what you are making. The dramaturgy, the interpretation, finding the language to bring others to a certain performance. Unfortunately, during those Maastricht days I lost control of life because of events on the home front: my parents had attempted suicide shortly after each other. That turned my world upside down."

What did your parents' double suicide attempt do to you?

"My parents were just divorced and coincidentally fed up with life at about the same time, without knowing it from each other. There is also a certain romance in that they wanted to end it separately and at the same time. That episode, that extreme low point with both of them, was kind of glossed over; we never talked about it in depth afterwards. My mother dismissed it with a simple explanation: life hurt too much and that had to stop. When the situation at home calmed down a bit, I didn't go back to Maastricht: I felt the urge to travel the world. While traveling, I began to long more and more for making things. Once back, I moved to Antwerp, where I started a studio and started painting. That went quite well. But rather than paintings, I wanted to make sculptures. I wanted to learn more about that: I went to the art academy in Den Bosch. I got in there and experienced an instant infatuation with that education. There I could do all the things I had come to dream about over the years. I could literally walk in one day from a blacksmith's fire to a film set and from a screen printing studio to a DTP course. That made me so happy that I wished it would never end. A golden time! With tears in my eyes, I closed the door there behind me after graduation. I immediately started a studio in Den Bosch and went to work as if the academy just continued. That led to exhibitions, interest came. That was a lot of fun for several years, but also tough because you're floating around in a kind of opportunity pool. I was lucky enough to be picked up by a number of people, who started writing about me. Among them Ann Demeester, the current director of the Frans Hals Museum. She offered me a major solo exhibition in Amsterdam. Those are crucial moments."

You belong to the generation of artists who started putting social design - back then it didn't have a name - into practice. One example is the Practice of the Ideal. Tell.

"Almost always it starts with a problem: 'project developer wants something, local residents don't' or 'company wants to implement a strategy, employees are against.' My stage is a moment of change. And my goal, above all, is to look at the problem with an enthusiasm, sometimes creating understanding on both sides, other times actually causing something that seems worse than what is originally about to happen, so that people think 'it's not so bad. Take the Practice of the Ideal: a corporation wants to build a new building on a special site, and the people living in the neighborhood are fed up with it from the start because everything around that site has always gone wrong. I am hired to do something about the situation. I don't belong to anyone, I am the inspired outsider who carries the romance of the new plans and works on the narrative."

You don't work with numbers, but with emotions. Isn't that difficult?

"No, because when I see emotions, I think: ha, now we're getting somewhere. For the project The Café That No Longer Existed, the municipality of Heerlen gave me carte blanche to create a large work of art in a neighborhood: 5,000 square meters were to be affected. The only condition the municipality set: if the neighborhood didn't embrace it, it wasn't going to happen. At which they warned that it was "not an easy neighborhood. I organized an evening at a local venue - let's get acquainted. Wrong start. Because I already had an idea when I came. I thought: I just need to learn their language and then explain in their words what I want to do. I went there with an idea and a handful of tricks to make that idea a reality. One such trick: have people never mention objects but verbs. So they can't say "we want a slide," but they can say "we want to play. Because then you yourself have the freedom to come up with a completely different play object. It went completely wrong. Rotten night. Bad start. We faced each other, I was already like everyone else. At home I asked my wife, who is a journalist: how do I get these people to accept something from me? She replied, "You should learn something about them. Have you ever thought of actually asking them something?' I went back to that district and said, 'We're going to do things differently. I want you to be my guide in the district.' Moments later, I was walking behind thirty guides - all with umbrellas in the air, I made something funny out of it - through the neighborhood. The ice melted, we struck up a conversation with each other. It turned out that they had one hard demand: they wanted flower boxes in the neighborhood. But I didn't feel like making flower boxes at all. After further questioning, it turned out that they thought that people were driving too fast in their neighborhood and that they had thought that these flower boxes would be nice obstacles to make sure that people drove less fast. My contact at the municipality told me that a decision had just been made to install speed bumps and turn the area into a 30-km zone. I was allowed to deliver the news. Mouths dropped open, to which I asked, "So can we stop talking about those flower boxes now? To which she replied, 'We don't like flower boxes at all either!' Hahaha."

What did you end up making?

"In that neighborhood there used to be a pub, where their fathers would smash the wages they had earned in the mines at the end of the week. They had fond memories of that, but at the same time they no longer wanted a café because of the inconvenience it caused. So I came up with the 'Café that no longer existed': a steel frame as a base, which you can hang tarpaulins on with life-size black-and-white photos of the café in the old days, from the past that they cherished so much. You zipper those sails to the structure and then it's just like sitting in the café of the past. The artwork can then really be used as a place for an event. At the opening, the people who were so critical in the beginning were emotionally erecting a replica of the pub where their own father used to drink a pint when the weekend began. The emotion that a place can suddenly evoke after the right intervention ... That, of course, touches me very strongly myself."

Your art is more in building new mindsets.

"People should get more help in finding their inspiration. The real intrinsic conviction to do what we're doing instead of life is what happens while you're making other plans. I think sometimes we do get very lavish with our time. Ignorance is blissful, but at the same time I think: if you're not going to execute a fag anyway, do it with conviction. That is what many of my projects are about: naming the real intrinsic value of something. Even of doing nothing. Or of doing everything and not succeeding. It can be so helpful to say "this is what we did together, this is what we thought was important. At its core, nothing means anything until we find the right words for it together. And that helps resolve impasses or conflicts. Just searching until people, or two parties facing each other, share a passion. I am the link that tries to uncover passion in everyone's beliefs in a dedicated and honest way."

Yet you also make tangible images, such as Choreography of Pure Poverty, in which you depicted the toil of unemployed people during the crisis years in Zwolle.

"I was asked to make a monumental sculpture a hundred years after compulsory labor in the Netherlands that would allow the passerby to experience something of the time, of the fact that tens of thousands of people did very hard anonymous work at a time when there was no good social system. There was charity through the church, but no social safety net. People in the crisis years didn't just want charity, they wanted work. They knew that. A family, converted to today, could get about 250 euros a month provided the father did 60-70 hours of physical labor a week. To make sure he was not distracted, he was taken to the other side of the province to work six days a week. Barefoot and with a shovel or wheelbarrow and could, for example, dig a two-acre pit to build an air base or a canal. So too in Zwolle. You can see that human angle in all my projects. That story of that worker, stripped of everything, who had to fight very hard to be able to support his family: that sacrifice in the face of the total anonymity of the work was something I found fantastic. All they had left were the footsteps and the trail of their wheelbarrow left in the earth. On the same ground where the heavy work was done at the beginning of the twentieth century, I made a forty-meter long embankment of dark brown concrete. Over this I walked myself barefoot with a wheelbarrow. As if it were an archaeological site, footsteps and wheel tracks are now visible there. My footsteps, in workers' shoes of various sizes, and also the footsteps of my children."

A little storyteller thinks of the end first. Your ending is visible at the Verbeke Foundation, in the form of your grave. How did you come up with the idea of In Loving Remembrance and what was it like to shape your grave?

"It was very emotional to design and build my own tombstone. From that project I have been very sad, but it has also made me calm. Because I have befriended the idea that one day I will die. And I feel that I have managed to secure an honorable place, already: in a museum under the smoke of Antwerp that manages the art collection of collector Geert Verbeke. Amidst the modern and contemporary art exhibited there, my grave awaits me: a concrete plaque topped by a steel chapel with glass - truly a French grave. And a hardy palm stands next to it, to symbolize the exotic places I am so in love with. For now, the epitaph consists only of my name and year of birth; the rest remains to be filled in."

You have two children aged eight and twelve. How do they look at the grave?

"Those put flowers with it when it was just displayed. I explained it to them, but they found it awkward."

So you will later be laid out like a work of art in a museum?

"I have a contract that says I will be buried in the museum's outdoor plot, and so will my wife. Wouldn't it be good, anyway, to lay people in the place they belong, say, the grave of a great writer near a library? What I like: my work briefly turns every visitor into a mourning passerby, just as I myself assume and shed identities. Young and old walk with their hands behind their backs through a field with all kinds of sculptures and installations, including the shortest highway in the world and, by Atelier van Lieshout, a gigantic replica of the human digestive system, and then suddenly they are standing in front of a grave. My art and my life, and therefore death, are so fused together that the line between them is blurred. Perhaps a nice addition to the epitaph would be, 'Here rests the mortal remains of my work.'"

Masters #44

MASTERS #44