Urban Scenography

A different approach to art in public space

MA Thesis Art History: Modern and Contemporary Art
University of Amsterdam

Marthe Koetsier
10667113
Supervisor: Jeroen Boomgaard
Second reader: Eva Fotiadi
June 30 2014
Table of Contents

Introduction.................................................................................................................3

Chapter 1 – Notions of the city........................................................................................7

1.1 The metropolis and mental life (Simmel).....................................................................7
1.2 The city through the eyes of the flâneur (Baudelaire and Benjamin)................................9
1.3 Walking in the city (De Certeau)..............................................................................10

Chapter 2 – Urban scenography as a concept in public art.................................................12

2.1 What is scenography?
How scenography brings its notion of space to contemporary art........................................12
2.1.1 The concept of space in exhibition making..............................................................14
2.2 Urban scenography as artistic concept in public space.................................................15
2.2.1 The city as performance space or scripted narrative.................................................15
2.2.2 Urban scenography as practical tool: creating awakening situations...........................17
2.2.3 Activist disruptions and rituals..............................................................................19
2.2.4 The urban intervention of public art.......................................................................21
2.3 Engagement with the city........................................................................................24
2.3.1 The shared experience: a physical and emotional experience....................................27
2.3.2 Engagement: creating consensus or agonistic pluralism?
Notions of solidarity in the shared experience..................................................................31
2.4 Urban scenography and the representation of the invisible...........................................34
2.4.1 Notions of illusion and the imaginable in urban scenography......................................34
2.4.2 Urban scenography and desire..............................................................................37

Chapter 3 – Constant Nieuwenhuys:New Babylon............................................................39

3.1 The concept and design of New Babylon....................................................................40
3.2 New Babylon as a model of a physical and emotional “other” space..............................46
3.3 Critique on New Babylon.........................................................................................48

Conclusion..................................................................................................................49

Bibliography................................................................................................................53

Images......................................................................................................................61

2
Introduction
When we look at today’s discussions about art, we are confronted with many different
perspectives on what art is and what place it takes or should take in our society. A lot of art
houses in conventional exhibition spaces like museums and galleries, which are often seen as
autonomous institutions that are not particularly known for their accessibility for a public who
does not make part of the “art crowd.” Recently this issue is becoming a more important item
on the agenda of Dutch museums, which are trying to attract a bigger and more diverse
audience.
Taking an interest in art in public space, I am curious about how art abides within the public
space of the contemporary city. How does it relate to the spatial environment of urban sites?
In his book Art, Space and the City (2000) Malcom Miles addresses this subject. He notes that
the term “public art” generally describes works created in or for sites of open public access. Art
has been moving out of the conventional art spaces into the public domain since the 1960’s,
and works range from monumental, sculptural objects and community murals to light
installations and performance art.1 Miles writes that public art claims to reflect on urban spaces
and to contribute to a re-envisioning and regenerating of the city. This first claim is plausible
when we look for example at the fact that public art acts in the public realm, and therefore
necessarily extends to issues like the diversity of urban cultures, the functions of public space,
the structures of power, and the relations between environment builders and urban
inhabitants.2
Nevertheless, Miles points out that the issue of public art regenerating the city remains
speculative. This is because values of contemporary art are seen independently from those of
the city. A lot of public art could be said to still live in its own bubble, still being influenced by
Modernism that imposes art to be an autonomous, aesthetic realm which acts as an alternative
to everyday life.3 The city, on the contrary, is generally said to involve user-centered strategies
for urban planning and design. When art and the city are discussed in relation to each other,
Miles argues that claims on the effectiveness of the contribution of public art on urban
sustainability and social benefits remain vague and undemonstrated, and perhaps they are
undemonstratable.4 Here I wonder what exactly is this urban development or regeneration we
seem to be looking for. How is it defined, and what does it tell us about how public art is and
can be positioned in relation to public space?
Firstly, public space is a concept that is very hard to define. In his book The Production of
Space (1974) Henri Lefebvre argues that space is a complex social construction that is formed
by an interaction between social and spatial relations. According to the writer, a space is
formed by means of the human body that perceives lives and produces.5 In other words, space

1 Miles, Malcom. Art, Space & the City. Public Art and Urban Futures. London: Routledge, 1997, p.5.
2 Idem, p. 1.
3 Idem, pp. 12-14.
4 Idem, p.2. Miles refers to Selwood 1995 (study of social impact of art programs in British cities by Comedia).
5 Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991 [1974], pp.
13, 14, 162, and Lukasz Stanek. Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of
Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011, p. ix.

3
constitutes of the way humans relate to it and therefore – to my understanding – does not
really seem to exist without them. Adam Kolodziej takes a comparable point of view, but refers
to urban space more specifically. He argues that the complex spatial construction of the city is
the apex of human civilization. 6 This means that not only human life and culture are the
constructors of cities, but cities also reflect the ways our civilization exists and works. On the
one hand the development of public space responds to the emotional complexity of human
behavior, on the other hand the city's spirit, also called genius loci, affects the way individuals
and communities coexist and interact in urban life. So according to Kolodziej, the city strongly
reflects the state of our society.7
Being aware of the interconnection between humans and urban environment, I am interested
in how public art interacts in between the two. I then find it important to first explore which
perceptions of contemporary urban space public art deals with. Miles and Kolodziej both argue
that public art takes place within a context of urban environment that in some respects we
believe to be subjected to decay, caused by economic and social changes made in the
seventies and eighties. Cities are considered to be rational and “practical.” Deriving from the
concept of the city as a machine, according to Kolodziej one can notice a disappearance of the
city's spirit.8
As I understand it this means that we have lost a kind of phenomenological connection with
the city, which is a connection that is based on structures of experience and consciousness. To
clarify, the opposite connection would be to see the city as a construction objects, separately
reacting upon each other. According to the writers the latter would be the ruling perspective on
the contemporary city. Up until today urban progress has been associated with urban and
economic expansion through rational planning. Perhaps under the influence of the
Enlightenment, we have compartmentalized our lives by creating cities of order and rules,
distanced from our own wastes.9 This would characterize urban inhabitants as rational, aloof
beings, driven by a capitalist economy and losing sight with their individual desires.
But Miles argues the Modernist aspirations of urban progress through economic and rational
expansion have been replaced by a post-modern cynicism, which recognizes that these
perspectives might no longer be viable in relation to the concept of public space.10 Kolodziej
argues there is a strong need for recognition of the city as a “dramatic character.” According to
the writer the city is not to be perceived as a machine, but as a living organism.11 This z shows
a moving away from approaching the city as a set of static objects constructed by commerce,
order and rationality, and a moving towards a perception based on a more intensified
emotional and physical experience and consciousness of the city – which Kolodziej claims to be
the aim of urban scenography.
In this thesis I want to explore the way public art could play a role in approaching urban public
6 Kolodziej, Adam. ‘Urban Scenography.’ 2008. http://commongroundpublishing.com. Consulted February 23 2014
<http://h08.cgpublisher.com/proposals/78/index_html>.
7 Ibidem.
8 Ibidem.
9 Miles 1997, p. 17.
10 Ibidem.
11 Kolodziej <http://h08.cgpublisher.com/proposals/78/index_html> February 2014.

4
space through a different perspective, seeing that its current one has a rather negative
connotation. Public art in itself is believed to have the potential to address our perception and
experience of urban environment. I want to propose a research on urban scenography, which
is an approach to public art that specifically relates to the dramatic construction of space and
thereby claims to provide a different perspective on urban spatial environment.
Deriving from theater practice, scenography is an artistic perspective on the visual,
experiential and spatial composition of performance.12 This means the discipline deals with the
way space is constructed and experienced. This might begin to make clear how scenography
could also be valuable in researching the way public art can play a role in taking a different
perspective on public space. Joslin McKinney claims in The Cambridge Introduction to
Scenography (2009) scenography is not simply concerned with creating and presenting images
to an audience, but regards the audience reception and engagement on both a physical and
emotional level. She writes that it is a sensory as well as intellectual experience, an emotional
as well as a rational one.13 This shows that scenography might be a useful approach in
analyzing how public art could play a different role in the experience of public space.
Thea Brejzek confirms this thought. Being an approach to the composition and experience of
space, Brejzek argues that scenography claims to operate far beyond the conventional theater
environment. Besides extending its own historical notion as decorative backdrop to a text
based drama, scenography moves toward the curatorial practice of art and other artistic spatial
practices.14 Proposing to be an approach to staging spaces in theater, exhibition, installation
and architecture, Brejzek argues scenography is a particularly suitable practice in all areas of
spatial design and curating that contain elements of mise-en-scène, narrativity,
transformativity and perceived reality, which includes art in public space.15
Jekaterina Lavrinec wrote several articles on the idea that the concept of urban scenography
could be used as an analytical and practical tool in revitalizing urban space through public art.
She explains how an urban scenographic approach to public artworks reveals interconnections
between space and everyday scenarios of citizens in the city, and how this awakens the urban
inhabitant’s consciousness of his environment. It therefore has the potential to initiate an
emotional link between the citizen and the city's space. This link revitalizes public spaces,
eventually reanimating and nourishing the city’s spirit.16
Taking on this claim of urban scenography to be an approach to public art that has the poten-
tial to regenerate the city, I want to explore in this thesis what notions of urban scenography
exist in making and curating art in urban environments, and how exactly the use of urban

12 Howard, Pamela. What is Scenography? London: Routledge, 2002, p. 130.

13 McKinney, Joslin. The Cambridge Introduction to Scenography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. p. 4.
14 Brejzek, Thea, ed. Expanding Scenography. On the Authoring of Space. Publication for the Scenography Expanding
1-3 Symposia, conducted in Riga, Belgrade and Évora, 2010, organized by the Prague Quadrennial of Performance
Design and Space. Prague: The Arts and Theater Institute, 2011, p. 8.
15 Ibidem.
Thea Brejzek, Wolfgang Greisenegger, Lawrence Wallen, eds. Space & Desire. Scenographic Strategies in Theatre,
Art and Media. Zurich: Zurich University of the Arts, 2011, p.4.
16 Lavrinec, Jekaterina. ‘Urban Scenography: Emotional and Bodily Experience’. In: Limes: Borderland Studies, Vol. 6,
No. 1 (2013): pp. 21-31, p. 21.
Kolodziej <http://h08.cgpublisher.com/proposals/78/index_html> February 23 2014.

5
scenography in public art could be of value within our current Western perception of public
space. My main question is therefore: How could the approach of urban scenography in public
art offer a different perspective on the contemporary city?
To answer this question, I first want to sketch out some of the notions of urban public space
that relate to the subject of public art and urban scenography. This is important because it will
shed some more light on the space that scenographic analysis addresses as well as on the con-
temporary city's critiques. Thus it might clarify the need for scenographic analysis in public art.
I will describe three different well-known perceptions of urban space according to the readings
of sociologist Georg Simmel, art critic and poet Charles Baudelaire, and philosophers Walter
Benjamin and Michel de Certeau. Although their theories originate from the nineteenth and
twentieth century, they write about a construction and perception of the city based on com-
merce, order and rationalism, which still appear to be the core of contemporary cities. Fur-
thermore, the first three writers found themselves living in times when big European cities
turned into capitalist driven places. This might have given them a specifically clear view on
how urban environment and urban inhabitants changed into what we know them to be today.
I will then expound on scenography itself, by researching how it can be seen as a concept in
contemporary art and how it is used in curating our most “public” exhibition space, the city.
In a case study of Constant Nieuwenhuys' re-envisioning urban art project New Babylon will
explore notions of scenography within this work specifically. Ultimately I wonder about the
effect of urban scenography's approach to public art in shaping spaces of experience and
engagement in urban environment. Do these experiences intervene with everyday life by
awakening our consciousness of our surroundings? Or do scenographic strategies break with
everyday life through the representation of the invisible and imaginable, creating an illusionary
environment?

6
Chapter 1. Notions of the city

1.1 The metropolis and mental life

Researching the position of urban scenography in public art, I think it is inevitable to take note
of the sociology based approach to our idea of the city and how it affects us. To set a clear
outline to the context of urban scenography we ought to look at our perception and critiques
concerning public space in contemporary cities, in order to explore in which ways public art is
and could be positioned in it. Sociologist Georg Simmel's (1858-1918) essay ‘The Metropolis
and Mental Life’ (1903)17 offers an interesting framework because it focuses on the human
perception of the city: the relation between the individual and “the outside.” Being one of
Simmel’s most influential and timeless essays, it describes the construction and influence of
the city on the mental state of its inhabitants, thereby giving some insight in the way urban
environment is processed by humans. As urban scenography claims to reveal the
interconnections between space and everyday scenarios that take place in the city, Simmel's
observations can give some insight in what these scenarios might entail and how we behave in
them. This could pinpoint our position in the contemporary city and thus make more sense of
the specific approach urban scenography takes within our perception of urban environment.
In addition, Simmel understands the metropolis as a concept beyond its physical boundaries.
According to the sociologist the city constitutes of the totality of effects which temporally and
spatially transcend from it. He not only perceives the city as the location of modernity, but as a
way of recognizing urban environment as an experience,18 a point of view urban scenography
also claims to take.
According to Simmel, the deepest problems of urban life derive from the attempt of the
individual to maintain his independence and individuality against the weight of the sovereign
powers of society, historical heritage and the external culture and technique of life.19 This
means the psychological foundation of the urban inhabitant is formed by a continuous meeting
between both internal and external impulses. The mind is continually stimulated by former and
present impressions. While lasting and regular impressions of low contrast – for example those
of small town or rural life – take less energy to process, Simmel explains that the striking and
ever changing images produced by the city are unexpected and more violent impulses. The
tempo and multiplicity of images that appear to the urban inhabitant as he walks the streets
form the foundation of his mental life.20
Simmel then argues that being exposed to these thousands of visual modifications, the
metropolitan character creates a protective organ to protect his inner life against the
disruptions of external life that threaten it. Instead of reacting emotionally he primarily reacts

17 Simmel, Georg Simmel. ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life.’ In: Gary Bridge, Sophie Watson, eds. The Blackwell City
Reader. Oxford and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002 [1903]: pp. 11-19.
18 Borden, Ian. ‘Space Beyond. Spatiality and the City in the Writings of Georg Simmel.’ In: The Journal of
Architecture (revised version), Vol. 2 (Winter 1997): pp.313-35, Abstract p. i. Retrieved from
<http://www.academia.edu/4247287/Space_Beyond_Space_and_the_City_in_the_Writings_of_Georg_Simmel>
May 26 2014, and Simmel 2002 [1903], p. 17.
19 Simmel 2002 [1903], p. 11.
20 Idem, pp. 11-12.

7
rationally, which to some extent numbs his sensitivity and removes him somewhat from his
personality as a way of protecting it from the domination of the city. This mental predominance
causes the mental life of the metropolitan character to appear essentially intellectualistic. 21
Furthermore Simmel argues that the metropolis has always been intertwined with the money-
economy, as it is the place where commercial activity takes place. What the domination of
intellect and capitalism have in common is a purely matter-of-fact attitude to the treatment of
both people and things. Characterized by calculability, impersonality, rationality and
maintaining intellectual relationships, life in the city is very closely connected with its
capitalistic and intellectualistic personality.22
How does this attitude and behavior of the urban inhabitant interfere with his perception and
experience of the city? A couple of years later Simmel would write that “the interpersonal
relationships of people in big cities are characterized by a markedly emphasis on the use of the
eyes.”23 In ‘The Metropolis of Mental Life’ he already starts to describe how the metropolitan
mentality influences the perception of urban surroundings. The emphasis on the eyes would
not mean a clearer view on urban environment, but instead a more superficial observation of
passers-by and urban sites. Simmel argues a blasé outlook of the metropolitan type is the first
consequence of the rapidly shifting and contrasting impressions. The essence of this attitude is
an indifference toward distinctions between objects. Not in the sense that they are not
perceived – which would be mental dullness – but rather that the meaning and value of
distinctions between things, and therewith the things themselves, are experienced as
meaningless.24 Ironically this reserved and indifferent attitude of the urban dweller toward his
fellow citizens are the most visible in dense crowds. According to Simmel, precisely the
physical closeness through a lack of space in the city makes intellectual distance clearly
visible.25
Having described some of the relations between urban inhabitants and their everyday
surroundings according to Simmel’s writings, we can note that these interconnections do not
necessarily have a positive connotation. As urban scenography aims to undermine the rational
and superficial perception of the city, we can begin to see that it is here where this specific
approach to public art could be useful in taking on a more conscious perception of the city. One
of the first notions of a less passive urban dweller comes forward in the representation of the
flâneur, an imaginary character who wanders around in the upcoming capitalist city and
actively observes his surroundings.

21 Simmel 2002 [1903], p. 11.

22 Idem, pp. 12-13.
23 Ganz, James A. Impressionist Paris: City of Light. [tent.cat.]. San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco,
2010, p. 19. Ganz refers to Georg Simmel, Mélanges de philosophie rélativiste: Contribution à la culture
philosophique. Trans. Alix Guillain. Paris, 2012, pp. 26-27.
24 “Seated in an economy of commerce, money can be said to have taken away quantitative distinctions and has
become a denominator of value.” In: Simmel 2002 [1903], p. 14.
25 Simmel 2002 [1903], p. 16.

8
1.2 The city through the eyes of the flâneur
The flâneur is a literary figure from 19th century France, who represents the newly experienced
anonymity in the rising capitalist city. He was described by Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)
and Walter Benjamin (1892-1940)26 and embodies the new kind of freedom that was
experienced in the modern cities of tis age. The crowd being his natural surrounding, the
flâneur is a casual wanderer who anonymously observes the street life of the city. As a way of
experiencing the city he perceives his surroundings with a certain detachment or diffused gaze,
treating urban scenes as spectacles.27 However, his perception is a little more nuanced than
Simmel's blasé outlook. The flâneur is able to encounter the city differently through this non-
focus. There is more space for his imagination, as Benjamin argues that the division between
reality and illusion fades in the flamboyant visualities of the modern city.28 Furthermore,
although lead by attractions, the flâneur combines his curiosity toward everyday scenes with
his physical experience in perceiving the city.29 This means he approaches his surroundings
with a certain level of emotional and physical consciousness.
As urban scenography aims to create a more emotional and physical conscious perception of
the city, I want to propose connecting the concept of urban scenography to the practice of
flânerie, considering the concept as a possible influence on urban scenography. Because as
Lavrinec describes in her article ‘From a 'Blind Walker' to an 'Urban Curator': Initiating
“Emotionally Moving Situations” in Public Spaces’ (2011), flânerie is exactly the method for
establishing a sensitive approach to the everyday city. This is because experiencing the city like
the flâneur requires an intensive reflection on the existing routines and structures that appear
to him in the public space of the city. The flâneur crosses different everyday paths of people
who are working or enjoying leisure time, choses his own paths through them and thereby
invents new routes for himself.30
Thus the flâneur is more active in experiencing his urban surroundings than just passively
strolling. He is sensitive to his physical experience of the city, constructing the different
routines, vistas, sounds, smells and tastes together to his own understanding of his
surroundings. His perception of the city also includes memories, dreams and emotions, as well
as his ability to describe the impressions and atmospheres as how he relates to them. This
means his self-awareness is raised, and he is somewhat pushed to take a position toward his
own individuality amidst the urban spectacle of the nineteenth century. This is how he explores
his own perception of the city.31

26 Baudelaire, Charles. ‘The Painter of Modern Life.’ In: Charles Baudelaire. Charles Baudelaire. Selected Writings on
Art and Literature. Trans. P.E. Charvet. London: Penguin, 1972 [1863]: pp. 390-435.
Walter Benjamin. ‘Paris: The Capital of the Nineteenth Century.’ Trans. New Left Review. In: Perspecta, Vol. 12
(1969) [1935, 1939]: pp. 165-172.
27 Ibidem.
28 Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. London and Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press, 1999 [1927-1940], p. 21.
29 Lavrinec, Jekaterina. ‘From a “Blind Walker” to an “Urban Curator”: Initiating “Emotionally Moving Situations” in
Public Spaces.’ In: Limes: Cultural Regionalistics, Vol. 4, No. 1 (2011a): 54-63, p. 55.
30 Ibidem.
31 Ibidem.

9
1.3 Walking in the City
Having discussed the concept of the flâneur, we are getting closer to a view on the city that
leaves more room for a reflexive emotional and physical experience of the city walker, like the
approach of urban scenography claims to do. Philosopher Michel de Certeau (1925-1986) also
recognizes a potential in the city walker to give new meaning to urban settings. He describes
his view in his book The practice of Everyday Life (1984), which I want to address here
because it seems to resemble the approach of urban scenography.
De Certeau argues that urban inhabitants should stop identifying with their surroundings and
model behaviors and should be critical toward existing scenarios in urban space, in order to
invent new ones. He critiques what he calls “blind walking,” a non-reflexive use of urban space
for which Miles and Simmel describe the outlines, to then bring forward the potential of a more
reflexive attitude toward city space that is also considered to be the foundation of urban
scenography.32
De Certeau poses a notion of the city as dynamic text, which is being written by citizens
through their everyday practices that he says to be necessarily spatial. However, he argues
that normally urban inhabitants perceive the city without really seeing it. As an elementary
form of experiencing the city, inhabitants walk through urban environments. But their bodies
follow the “urban text” they write without being able to read it themselves. As De Certeau
illustrates: “Their knowledge of [space] is as blind as that of lovers in each other’s arms.”33
In her article ‘From a “Blind Walker” to an “Urban Curator”: Initiating “Emotionally Moving
Situations” in Public Spaces” (2011) Jekaterina Lavrinec makes more sense of De Certeau's
line of thought by describing how for a wandering inhabitant the city emerges as spatial
configurations of obstacles and their absence, like street curbs, crowds, puddles or
construction sights. They influence the routes, rhythms and bodily experience of the walker,
proposing better or worse moving conditions. This practical knowledge about the city is
embedded in the spatial structures of the city, formed by power structures like politics or a
more concrete example: city planners.34 Lavrinec tries to illustrate here how urban inhabitants
automatically walk through the city, without realizing how their paths are affected by urban
structures and objects.
However, De Certeau does not think urban surroundings and the routines of everyday life have
a dominant effect on the city walker. Power structures might be oppressive, but ultimately they
are not able to completely control the spontaneous and creative energies of urban
inhabitants.35 De Certeau then wonders how a reflexive position toward the everyday urban
surrounding could be established. Recognizing everyday life as the site of power structures and

32 Lavrinec 2011a, p. 57.

33 Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 2002 [1984], p. 93.
34 Lavrinec 2011a, p. 55.
De Certeau 2002 [1984], pp. 98-99.
35 Sommer, Moritz. ‘Is Everyday Life Best Understood as Site For Creative Agency or Structural Determination?
Assessing Certeau's reaction to Foucault.’ Essay MSc Political Sociology, London School of Economics and Political
Science, January 18 2013. Retrieved from
<http://www.academia.edu/3400838/Assessing_de_Certeaus_reaction_to_Foucault> April 17 2014, p.7.
De Certeau 2002 [1984], pp. xiv-xv.

10
inequalities, he poses that actually the very “ordinary” practices of everyday life – like walking,
dwelling, cooking and talking – are the creative resistances of people.36 Individuals navigate
through life in their own way, through for example streets, newspapers and television, thereby
changing existing rules, structures and territories. De Certeau calls the use or consumption of
these everyday practices “tactics.” They provide obstacles to ruling hegemonies, and allow a
developing of individuality. Through them citizens invent their own ways of living everyday life,
referring to the original French title of De Certeau's book, L'invention du Quotidien: we create
our own everyday life. From this perspective, resistance to indifference toward urban
environment is everywhere.37
In chapter VII 'Walking in the City' De Certeau expounds on the practice of walking specifically.
As an opposition to the non-reflexive blind walking, he first poses the totalizing, elevated
perspective of the all-seeing eye, which grasps the urban “text” seen all at once. However, this
perspective also appears to be blind in the sense that what the urban inhabitant sees is only a
representation of urban life: this panoptic view is seen from on high as an abstract geometrical
spatial design.38 Instead, the urban walker's city down below has the potential to offer a more
reflexive perspective. The walking citizen makes spatial order exist, so like actors on stage,
pedestrians can make parts of the city disappear and exaggerate others. To the Certeau,
walking is a tactic through which pedestrians can survive and resist the strategy of the
environment which is planned by those in power.39 It is this reflexive walker, “choreographing”
his way through the city, who touches the essence of the conscious approach of urban
scenography to public space.

Through the perspectives of Simmel, Baudelaire, Benjamin and De Certeau I have tried to set
a framework for our understanding of the contemporary city: the site of public art and urban
scenography. The city appears to us as ever changing and contrasting images that cross the
eye, and we process them in different ways. Clearly all writers seem to suggest that the
controversies, spectacle, rationality, consumerism and routines of the modern city make us
respond indifferent to our surroundings and fellow citizens. Regarding this specific form of
urban decay, they speculate about a character that is able to re-envision urban environment.
This would be an inhabitant who is critical toward the structures and paths of everyday life,
thereby revitalizing both public space and his individual experience of the city.
Thinking about such a character, the approach of urban scenography in public art comes to the
fore. It is believed to address the urban inhabitant’s consciousness of his urban surroundings,
aiming to refocus his perspective and thereby revitalizing public space. Therefore I now want
to research what notions of urban scenography exist in making and curating public art and how
exactly it claims to change the perspective of urban inhabitants.

36 De Certeau 2002 [1984], p. xviii.

37 Idem, pp. xiv, xix-xx, and Sommer 2012, p. 7.
38 De Certeau 2002 [1984], pp. 91-98.
Lavrinec 2011a, pp. 54-55.
39 Bryant-Bertail, Sarah. Space and Time in Epic Theater: The Brechtian Legacy. Rochester, NY: Camden House;
Boydell & Brewer Inc., 2000, p. 12.

11
Chapter 2. Urban scenography as a concept in public art

2.1 What is scenography? How scenography takes its notion of space into the field of
contemporary art
In What is Scenography? (2002) Pamela Howard defines scenography – a practice originated in
theater – as the “seamless synthesis of space, text, research, art, actors, directors and
spectators that contributes to an original creation.”40 This definition describes scenography as
the visualization of a dramatic text or idea, translated in a scene or performance space. The
term derives from the Greek sceno-grafika which is generally understood as “the writing of the
stage space.” Scenography could be seen as the materialization of the imagination,41 which
indicates that scenography’s practice is about the construction of meaning in theater.42
According to Howard and Joslin McKinney, writer of The Cambridge Introduction to
Scenography (2009), scenography is not only a practice in which individual elements form the
composition or design of a performance. McKinney argues it could also be seen as an artistic
perspective on the visual, experiential and spatial composition of performance. 43 This means
scenography concerns the reception and engagement of the audience, constructing a physical
as well as emotional experience. In other words, it is about perceiving performance space not
only as a physical place but also as a concept that is more metaphorical, formed by both
experience and imagination of the spectator. Howard notes that this is why space is the first
and most important material – and challenge – in scenography. Space is translated and
adapted to be linked with an artistic concept or idea, to create a suggestive space, and to
create meaning.44
In Space and Desire. Scenographic Strategies in Theatre, Art and Media (2011) Thea Brejzek
introduces scenography as a study of space. Its practice has moved into other disciplines such
as contemporary art. According to Brejzek, this is caused by a major paradigmatic shift that
originated in the 1990's and changed the way theater practice relates towards authenticity,
liveness and mediatization45. This change derived from a rise of documentary practices, media
technologies and internet in the field of performance, which implement fragments of urban
existence into the theater space.46 Internationally, scenographers, performers and directors are
experimenting with urban intervention, digital performance and mixed media formats, which is
how they extend the conventional theater space into spaces of action, participation and
critique, Brejzek argues. The single illusionary spaces of the historical stage are replaced by
multidisciplinary spaces that have a more metaphorical and virtual character and contain
elements of seduction, but also of disillusionment and critique.47 This means that performance
spaces are constructed in a way that they do not only take the spectator into the realm of

40 Howard 2002, p. 130.

41 Howard quotes scenographer Jozef Ciller.
42 Howard 2002, pp. 125, xiii-xv.
43 McKinney 2009, p. 4.
44 Howard 2002, p. 1.
45 Refers to the increasing role of the media.
46 Brejzek et al. 2011, p.5.
47 Ibidem.

12
fairytale-like illusion and imagination, but also create spaces that are constructed of both
realistic and imaginary elements through which they could provide critical perspectives.
I want to note here that Brejzek's “single illusionary space” opposed to the multi-layered space
is a way of perceiving performance practice rather black-and-white. However, we do have the
ability to place this development in history after the actionist performance art of the sixties and
seventies. Ever since then theater has been intertwining increasingly with the public spaces of
urban life which provide performance with some critical intent. This being said, the elements of
illusion and critique add to our understanding of staging spaces, and I believe it is here where
scenography's potential within the field of contemporary art comes to the surface. The practice
addresses the construction of space and has the ability to unravel it.
Thus as a concept in performance, scenography has changed and made itself adaptable to
other fields of spatial design. With an emphasis on the performative elements of space, 48
spatial design has moved toward “staged gestures of spatiality,” as Brejzek calls it. 49 It is an
approach in which spaces are conceptualized, constructed and realized to create meaning and
experience. This is why scenography can be used as a transdisciplinary design strategy within
as well as outside the conventional theater environment, like in art, architecture and public
space. Through this reading Brejzek describes the scenographer not as someone who
visualizes scripted narrative in a space, but rather as an author who constructs a space
through creating situations, interaction and communication.50
In Narrative Spaces: On the Art of Exhibiting (2012) Frank den Oudsten and Suzanne Mulder
argue that the moving of scenography out of theatrical practice coincides with developments in
the art world.51 They refer to the book The Experience Economy: Work is Theater & Every
Business a Stage (1999) in which B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore predicted an era in
which experience would become a commodity. In their view the consumer was going to want
more than a product, he would want experience.52 This also became apparent in the growing
interest of the art world in offering experiences. The theatrical exhibitions that were designed
in museums and elsewhere from the late 1990's onward have become generally associated
with this trend. Mulder notes that the stage-managed exhibitions by a new generation of
scenographers show an interesting development in this respect.53 54

48 Concerning the construction and expression of objects.

49 Brejzek et al. 2011, p.4.
50 Ibidem.
51 Kossmann, Herman, Suzanne Mulder, Frank den Oudsten, Narrative Spaces: On the art of Exhibiting, Rotterdam:
010 Publishers, 2012, p. 10.
52 Pine, Joseph B., James H. Gilmore. The experience Economy. Work is Business and Every Theatre a Stage. Boston,
MA : Harvard Business Review Press, 2011 [1999].
53 Kossmann et al. 2012, pp. 150, 155.
54 Earlier on art exhibition has seen some interesting examples of these “narrative spaces” as well, mainly between
1920 and 1940. The avant-garde of this period, such as the surrealist movement, used the exhibition as a way to
express their views on art itself. They wanted to express new insights and evoke new experiences. Artists tried to
transform the traditional, neutral exhibition area into an environment that embodied their ideology. The surrealists
traced back all art to the unconscious. As a reaction to the current dominance of rational thought, they posed the
principle of free association, like is experienced in the consciousness of dreams. This specific view could be seen in
their exhibition making. For example, Marcel Duchamp created exhibitions that looked like strange suggestive,
dreamlike worlds (exhibition of 1938 of surrealist art in Paris). In: Kossmann et al. 2012, pp. 147-150.

13
2.1.1 The concept of space in exhibition making
With this specific approach to space scenography has been translated into the practice of
contemporary art. Since a couple of decades space has been used as a material in curating
exhibitions. In her MA thesis Scenography as New Ideology in Contemporary Curating and the
Notion of Staging in Exhibitions (2013) Margaret Choi Kwan Lam writes that recently
scenography is developing itself as a phenomenon in the exhibition scene of the art world.
Scenography acts in the field of contemporary curating and is presumed to announce a radical
ideological shift in this practice. As Choi Kwan Lam explains it, it indicates an increasing
awareness of the notion of staging experiences in the way that the physical spaces for art are
more and more perceived as metaphorical stages – as has been argued above – including
different concepts like authorship, architectural embodiment, layered narrative, experience,
dramaturgy and expressions of new media.55
I think Carson Chan gives a clear image of what this staging of experience and expression
entails in curating today. In his article 'Measures of an Exhibition: Space, Not Art, Is the
Curator's Primary Material' he expounds on the notion of space as a material in exhibition
making. According to Chan space has become the independent curator’s autonomous object of
study by specifically illuminating the physical experience and expression of the exhibition
space. Chan here proposes the curator as an auteur, who has come to use space as his
primary material. In creating an exhibition experience the curator considers the exhibition
space’s scenography, socio-historical context, audience and infrastructure: the aesthetic and
intellectual scope of the space. The experience of the exhibition is formed individually within
each spectator as he moves about in the space,56 although his perception can be
choreographed by the curator in a way that best conveys both the exhibition’s and the artists’
intentions.57 Natalie Heinich and Michael Pollak appear to think accordingly. In their article
'From Museum Curator to Exhibition Auteur: Inventing a Singular Position' they point out how
the exhibition space turned into an artwork itself, due to the transformation of the role of the
curator.58 Noting this relevancy of scenography as a study of space in contemporary art, could
this notion of scenography also be found in curating art in public space, the sites of urban
environment?

55 Choi Kwan Lam, Margaret . ‘Scenography as New Ideology in Contemporary Curating and the Notion of Staging in
Exhibitions.’ Dissertation MA Curating Contemporary Design, Kingston University London in partnership with the
Design Museum, September 2013. Retrieved from <http://online.fliphtml5.com/wojf/ynmk/#p=1> March 2 2014,
p. ii.
56 Chan, Carson. 'Measures of an Exhibition: Space, Not Art, Is the Curator’s Primary Material.’ In: Fillip, Vol. 13
(Spring 2011). Retrieved from <http://fillip.ca/content/measures-of-an-exhibition> January 8 2014. Chan refers to
Charlotte Klonk. Spaces of Experience: Art Gallery Interiors from 1800 to 2000. New Haven: Yale University Press,
2009.
57 Chan 2011. Also referred to by me in: Koetsier, Marthe. ‘Art & Space.’ Essay for seminar Thinking Modern and
Contemporary Art by Eva Fotiadi, MA Art History, University of Amsterdam, January 21 2014, pp. 8-9.
58 Heinich, Natalie, Michael Pollak. 'From Museum Curator to Exhibition Auteur: Inventing a Singular Position.' In:
Reesa Greenberg, Bruce Ferguson, Sandy Nairne, eds. Thinking about Exhibitions. London and New York:
Routledge, 1996, p. 231.

14
2.2 Urban scenography as artistic concept in public space

2.2.1 The city as performance space or scripted narrative

Projecting the concept of scenography on the mise-en-scène of the city, the concept of urban
scenography could be seen as an artistic perspective on the visual, experiential and spatial
composition of public space. In her article 'Urban Scenography: Emotional and Bodily
Experience' (2013) Jekaterina Lavrinec argues its approach could be used to deconstruct
existing power structures59 embedded in urban sights by revealing the interconnections
between urban life and public space.60 Considering this to be a viable argument, urban
scenography could be interpreted as a critique on Simmel's rather pessimistic outlook on the
urban inhabitant, who is supposedly controlled by a blasé outlook and rationality. Here urban
scenography addresses the potential of the urban inhabitant or spectator to perceive the city
through a different perspective.
Taking a closer look at Lavrinec's argumentation, she proposes a link between urban
scenography and the theories of De Certeau on the potential of the urban walker formulated in
The Practice of Everyday Life.61 Both awaken the citizen's consciousness to perceiving public
space not only as monumental surroundings of the city, but to the idea that urban sites
planned by panoptic powers actually construct and choreograph our everyday lives – although
we can put up resistance to it. Lavrinec argues that theoretically, urban scenography aims to
give an analysis of urban reality and proposes an experience of the city that is double layered:
it is a physical as well as emotional experience.62 The spatial configurations of the city produce
certain possibilities for the urban walker, who can therefore choose to be an active interpreter
of urban space. He can passively follow spatial instructions, or he can start developing
alternative scenarios or routes.63 The urban wanderer can thereby take a more conscious,
individual and critical stance toward the dynamic configurations of urban elements that form
one of the bases for his everyday life, and create new perspectives. Through this approach the
urban walker is able to see the city not as a practical phenomenon constructed by static
objects and structures, but is he able to construct it with his individual visualization and
imagination, thereby feeding the city's spirit – its genius loci.64
Now I want to consider that theoretically the approach of urban scenography could be
described as perceiving public space as a kind of performance space, which is not an
ungrounded idea if we look back at De Certeau's theories of public space. As seen in the
theatrical background of the term, scenography derives from a historical tradition of linking
imagery and text, vision and meaning. This graphic condition is based on the visual translation

59 In urban scenography to be understood as structures of politics, sociology, culture and gender, or a more concrete
example: city planners and architects.
60 Lavrinec 2013, p. 21.
61 Idem, pp. 21-22.
62 Lavrinec refers to McKinney 2009, p. 4.
63 Lavrinec 2013, p. 22.
64 This last issue will be addressed separately later in this thesis.

15
of text in space,65 and can be compared to De Certeau's understanding of the city as dynamic
text which is being written by citizens through their everyday practices. According to his
argumentation these everyday practices are embedded in urban spaces, but also have the
ability to change its shape. In moving around through the city, between work, home and
leisure, people organize and obstruct places every day. This means that they select and link
spaces, making sentences and itineraries out of them. This is how the constellation of urban
elements, which De Certeau calls “spatial syntax”, can be said to have a narrative structure.66
In her master Thesis City as Narrative in Introducing the New Midway: A Study in Urban
Scenography (2006) Nuria Montblanch also gives insight in the idea of the city as a
performance space. She describes how every city contains millions of conditions for different
kinds of narratives. Like in a theatrical performance, these stories are being told by different
characters that evolve through interactions, changing emotions, time and space.67 Lavrinec
writes accordingly that different movements encourage individual “choreographies” of the city
walkers.68 They are formed by the interplay between the human body and everyday settings of
urban environment.
According to my understanding this makes the city comparable to a performative space as
well: it is the overall expression of the construction of different realities of different individuals.
The physical dynamics of individual the urban walker, perceivable as choreography, are
performed in the space of the urban environment, perceivable as the staged narrative.69
Kolodziej's approach to urban scenography underlines this notion of urban space. He writes: “It
stems from the visualization of life’s script, told by our history, cultural context and, most
interestingly, from our emotional needs.”70
As analytical approach urban scenography is a particular field of expertise and way of thinking
that draws parallels with dramaturgy. But where the dramaturg is oversensitive to visual and
sensorial composition of space and structures it through its spatiality and temporality, I think
urban scenography takes a slightly different approach. The foundation of its method becomes
visible in De Certeau's argumentation, in which he describes a specific approach to spatial
environments. While in a city different narratives are continuously building, De Certeau notes
that normally the urban walker (the “blind walker”) does not pay any attention to everyday
urban environment, until he is mentally detached from his surroundings – even for a short
moment. So he proposes that the urban walker stops identifying with his surroundings, routine

65 Donger, Simon. ‘Gloom. Scenography as praxis of imperceptibility.’ Submission to PHD, The Royal Central School
of Speech and Drama, University of London, 2012. Retrieved from
<http://crco.cssd.ac.uk/456/1/Gloom_Scenography_as_Praxis_of_Imperceptibility.pdf> May 4 2014.
66 De Certeau 2002 [1984], p. 115.
Next to urban curating also other fields use this narrative analysis, for example architectural theory. The discipline
attempts to see our physical trajectories through buildings as virtual narratives or dynamic paths of which visitors
are asked to fulfill and to complete with their bodies and movements. In: Lavrinec 2013, p. 24: refers to Fredric
Jameson 1990, p. 43.
67 Montblanch, Nuria. ‘Introducing the New Midway: A Study in Urban Scenography.’ Abstract from MA Thesis
Architecture, Dalhousie University, Canada, 2006. Retrieved from <http://www.nuriamontblanch.com/Urban-
Scenography> March 24 2014.
68 Lavrinec 2013, p. 22.
69 Idem, p. 25.
70 Kolodziej <http://h08.cgpublisher.com/proposals/78/index_html> February 23 2014.

16
scenarios and behaviors in order to rethink the composition of space.71 This is how he is able to
take a more reflexive position toward existing urban scenarios and invent new ones. It is a
certain technique of defamiliarization to establish an active reinterpretation of everyday
choreography, a task which Lavrinec ascribes to the urban scenographer, or “urban curator”, as
she calls him.72

2.2.2 Urban scenography as practical tool – Creating awakening situations

As theoretical approach the aims of urban scenography are evident. But how is this
detachment from everyday scenarios and imposed structures, like described by De Certeau,
actually brought into practice within urban scenography's approach to public art?
In ‘From Blind Walker to Urban Curator’ Lavrinec points out that the concept of detachment is
quite close to the ideas of the Situationist International, an international organization of social
revolutionaries that was active from 1957 to its dissolution in 1972. The Situationists aimed to
establish a creative distance from their everyday urban surroundings.73 De Certeau's notion of
the scripted narrative embedded in urban sites by power structures can be compared to the
Situationist's central theory of “the spectacle”, developed by Guy Debord in his book The
Society of the Spectacle (1967).74 The term refers to the superficial existence of the modern
city, that introduced itself in the twenties with its commerce, mass media, fetishism of
commodities and alienation. In these cities of spectacles – which were strongly criticized by the
Situationists – commerce and commodities rule urban inhabitants and turn them into
consumers. The Situationists rebelled against being passive subjects of the spectacle. One of
their techniques to establish distance between them and their everyday urban surroundings
was “drifting” (dérive).75
As Lavrinec describes, drifting as a research practice is based on the recognition of the
interconnection between urban settings and the physical as well as emotional experience of the
citizen, and a need for a critical perspective on this relation.76 Debord describes that “in a
dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, work and leisure
activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be
drawn by the attractions of the terrain and encounters they find there.”77 Through this
technique they attempt to resist routine scenarios established by urban planning. Debord
emphasized that drifting is different from an everyday stroll, as it involves playful behavior and
awareness of psycho-geographical effects.” 78 Lavrinec notes that in some respects drifting

71 De Certeau 2002 [1984], pp. xiv, xix-xx.

Montblanch 2006.
72 Lavrinec 2011a, p. 57.
73 Plant, Sadie. The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age. New York: Routledge,
1992.
74 Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Black & Red. Detroit: Black & Red, 1970 [1967].
75 Debord, Guy. ‘Theory of the Dérive.’ In: Ken Knabb, ed. Situationist International Anthology. Berkeley, CA: Bureau
of Public Secrets, 2006 [1956]. Retrieved from <http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/theory.html> April 29 2014.
76 Lavrinec 2013, p. 22.
77 Debord 2006 [1956].
78 The effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of
individuals. Guy Debord. ‘Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography.’ In: Ken Knabb, ed. Situationist
International Anthology. Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006 [1955]. Retrieved from
<http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/urbgeog.htm> April 29 2014. Lavrinec 2011a, p. 56. Refers to Debord [1956].

17
reminds of Benjamin's flânerie. But where the Situationists drifted in groups to come to more
objective perspectives through cross-checking, Benjamin argues that solitude is the most
important condition of flânerie because it results in more personal views.79
The Situationists ultimate aim was to create provocative and disturbing urban settings, which
would then encourage citizens to invent their own scenarios, different from those proposed by
“the spectacle” or the power structures of the modern city. Lavrinec points out that the drift in
itself is not a self-sufficient act, but rather the preparation for a resistance of everyday life. It
intends to create awareness of the territory where further radical changes were thought to
take place.80
So drifting actually appears to be a technique of an initial exploration of the structures of urban
settings. The Situationists also developed the concept of “détournement”, which was a more
active method to create a reflexive attitude toward everyday surroundings and scenarios – and
which also moves closer to the essence of urban scenography's practice in public art. Debord
and artist Gil J. Wolman developed this concept, which can be seen as a rethinking of urban
scenarios through deconstructing urban structures initiated by disturbing perspectives and
situations. Artistic productions were a main playing field of these détournements, as its
expression could bring new decompositions to light.81 Debord and Wolman wrote in 1956 that if
détournements were extended to public space, these had the potential to reconstruct whole
neighborhoods or even entire cities. They argued: “Life can never be too disorienting:
détournement on this level would really spice it up.”82 In terms of the physical sites of public
space, the idea that existing architectural forms could be “détrourned” turned into the
Situationist concept of “unitary architecture”, which critiqued the controls of non-
transformative architecture and city planning. Instead it proposed a permanent transformation
and reconstruction of the city in temporal and spatial terms.83
In The Situationist City (1999) Simon Sadler points out that the Situationists ultimately wanted
to create unpredictable and deconstructing situations within the sphere of artistic practices. He
explains that these situations would clearly be some sort of performances with such a strong
presence in public space that they would move people to new sorts of behavior based on
interaction and play.84 Sadie Plant adds in her book The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist
International in a Postmodern Age (1992) that the situations the organization aimed for were
moments that were meant to reawaken urban inhabitants by motivating them to get in touch

79 Lavrinec 2011a, p. 56. Refers to Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
1999, p. 805.
80 Lavrinec 2011a, pp. 56-57.
81 Situationist International. ‘Détournement as Negation and Prelude.’ Trans. Ken Knabb. In: Internationale
Situationniste, Vol. 3 (1959). Retrieved from <http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/315> May 4
2014.
82 Debord, Guy, Gil J. Wolman. 'A User’s Guide to Détournement.’ Trans. Ken Knabb. In: Situationist International
Anthology. Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006 [1956]. Retrieved from
<http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/detourn.htm> May 4 2014.
83 Chardronnet, Ewen. The History of Unitary Urbanism and Psychogeography at the Turn of the Sixties. Examples
and Comments of Contemporary Psychogeography. Lecture notes conference, Riga Art & Communication Festival,
May 2003. Retrieved from <http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ewen-chardronnet-the-history-of-unitary-
urbanism-and-psychogeography-at-the-turn-of-the-sixties> May 4 2014.
84 Lavrinec 2011a, p. 58. Refers to Simon Sadler. The Situationist City. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1998,
p. 105.

18
with their authentic desires. They were to experience a feeling of liberation and adventure.85
Anything that could disturb the ordered world capitalism and labor – from poetry and political
theory to free play – would help to defeat the elements of order and “spectacle” in modern
cities.86
The upheavals of 1968 in France are seen as constructed situations that were intertwined with
the ideologies of the Situationists. Although it is difficult to point out to what extent the
Situationists had influence on these actions, the movement can be said to have moved people
to initiate these situations or to have had a direct impact on the happening of the events. The
vocabulary, tactics and aims of the upheavals fully expressed the ideas of the Situationists.87
The events were mainly acted out by students in the streets of Paris (images 1 and 2). The
actions brought elements of play, festivity, spontaneity, carelessness and imagination into the
realm of human behavior in public space. Participants tried to create situations in which life
was considered an exciting game. This was one of their main tactics to mock and provoke
capitalist structures. Although the students desperately tried to distinguish themselves from
the working population, all the other roles and rules of the capitalist city were rejected. The
slogans “Never work!” clearly showed a rejection of the dominating life of labor and commerce.
According to Plant the upheavals were something that the Situationists and their predecessors
had dreamed about for years.88
Lavrinec argues that for the Situationists urban art interventions provided a good method of
creating physically and emotionally moving situations. By disturbing their everyday paths and
behaviors, the Situationists could create a reflexive distance from their routines and create
space for new perspectives on the construction of their lives, shaped by the cities they live in.89
But although a series of happenings and events occurred, both Lavrinec and Plant note that
the Situationists did not convincingly succeed in realizing their plans of creating disruptive
situations or defeating the urban everyday life as it then occurred. However, they believed their
involvement with the upheavals of 1968 helped a revolution on its way. 90 Leaving this up for
debate, can we recognize these kinds of disruptions within the practice of urban scenography
in the contemporary field of art in public space?

2.2.3 Activist disruptions and rituals

Turning to the contemporary city, Lavrinec poses the concept of “urban curator” in her
exploration of recent notions of urban scenography in public space. With this term she refers to
the urban inhabitant who has the potential to take a different perspective on everyday life and
is able to create disruptions or new “choreographies” in these routines. According to the writer,
the approach of urban scenography can be used as a tool in creating these urban

85 Plant, Sadie. The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age. New York: Routledge,
1992, pp. 10, 101.
86 Idem, p. p.5.
87 Idem, p. 94.
Although there were also a lot of violent protests and riots during the 1968 upheavals in Paris.
88 Idem, p. 70.
89 Lavrinec 2011a, p. 58.
90 Plant 1992, p. 5.

19
interventions.
Lavrinec describes the urban curator as “a reflexive activist, who is conscious about urban
structures and problems and reacts to them by initiating actions in public space that are
addressed to both urban communities and authorities.”91 The urban activist studies the city as
dynamic configuration of everyday life through performing creative and participatory activities
in the city. These are comparable to the initiated “situations” of the Situationists. 92
Today a great number of interventions, actions, flash mobs, freezes and urban games are
organized by urban activists. The New York based collective “Improv Everywhere” aims to
produce certain emotional experiences by surprising casual passers-by. In Surprise Torch Run
(2014) a performer acting as an injured athlete asked people on the street to carry a burning
torch around the block (image 3). Once they turned the corner they were surprised by TV
crews and a huge crowd of people cheering.93 Besides creating a surprisingly scene of chaos
and joy in urban environment, the collective caused the urban walker to change the routine of
his walks through the city. Initiator of the worldwide campaign Free Hugs Juan Mann addressed
today's social disconnectivity and lack of physical contact through his actions of giving away
hugs to passers-by on the street.94 According to Lavrinec campaigns, performances and actions
like these enquire unusual “choreographies” of participants and temporarily cause alternate
scenarios, emotions and behaviors in public space.95
The alternative situations created by urban activists use the temporal character of public places
like railway stations and parks, but as a rule do not become a ritual of these particular places.
However they often spread across the world where they are repeated in similar public places.
But being active re-interpretations of routine scenarios and spacial structures of urban places,
Lavrinec notes that these “urban rituals” can also function as the subject of activist actions.
Urban rituals are repetitive symbolic actions that are connected to a certain urban element and
provide the possibility of shared bodily and emotional experience in different public spaces.96
An urban ritual that according to Lavrinec initially started as a spontaneous urban intervention
concerns the so-called love padlocks. Couples engrave their names in padlocks and lock them
to fences and railings in public spaces, after which they throw away the keys. This ritual can be
seen as a symbolic action that connects romantic feelings to a certain place. Being a ritual that
is easy to understand, it expanded to cities all over the world. Now it takes only one padlock
on a fence to have it be filled with thousands of them only a few weeks later (image 4).97
In terms of creating a regenerating situation in accordance with the aim of urban scenography,
this urban intervention connects human emotions and a collective experience to a specific
place in the city. But observing the urban interventions of the activist mobs and rituals

91 Lavrinec 2011a, p. 57.

92 Ibidem.
93 Todd, Charlie. ‘Surprise Torch Run.’ www.improveverywhere.com. Consulted April 30 2014
<http://www.improveverywhere.com/>.
94 Mann, Juan. ‘Free Hugs.’ www.freehugscampaign.org. Consulted April 30 2014
<http://www.freehugscampaign.org/>.
95 Lavrinec 2011a, p. 59.
96 Ibidem.
97 Lavrinec 2011a, p. 60.

20
described by Lavrinec, we must note that these interventions are not very disruptive or critical
toward urban structures and powers. They are mainly based on the elements of spectacle,
surprise and community, which cause emotions of joy instead of a critical rethinking of public
space.

2.2.4 The urban intervention of public art

Recently different writers have explored the expanding notion of space as a material in
curating public art, as I researched in a short essay on art and space for the seminar Thinking
Modern and Contemporary Art.98 It appears the approach of urban scenography is ultimately
based on a proposal of disrupting daily urban routines and structures through interventions of
art in public space. Looking at public art through the perspective of urban scenography, it has
the potential to change the everyday patterns of the city through addressing, composing or
disrupting public space.
In her essay 'Public Art as Situation: Towards an Aesthetic of the Wrong Place in Contemporary
Art Practice and Commissioning' (2008) Claire Doherty describes art as a space that frames
our perception. According to her, space in art practice is not a kind of locality, but an
intellectual or experiential space. Therefore public art can better be understood as an
experience that frames and disrupts our perception.99 In this sense art is not bound to the
physicality of its location, contains the notion of art being a space in which thoughts are being
changed and newly created.100 Doherty posits public art as a shift in the perception of place:
“The experience of art is not one in my opinion that necessarily restores a sense of belonging
or offers up a moment of resolution, but if truly place-responsive, situation-specific and
contemporary that work of art will shatter the fictions of a stable sense of place, will intervene
in the status quo and literally shift the ground between your feet.”101 This description argues
that public art has the potential to disrupt intellectual frames, which helps us understand the
critical perception of space within the practice of urban scenography.
Doherty brings forward a couple of works that disrupt the perception of place. She describes
Francis Alÿs' When Faith Moves Mountains (2002), an action in which five hundred volunteers
formed a line along a sand dune just outside Lima and used shovels to “move” the sand dune
ten centimeters from its original position (images 5 and 6).102 This work directs attention on
the poor living circumstances of the inhabitants of Lima's outskirts.103 Another work Doherty
mentions is Javier Tellez's One Flew Over the Void (2005), an event in the US-Mexican border

98 Koetsier, Marthe. ‘Art & Space.’ Essay for seminar Thinking Modern and Contemporary Art by Eva Fotiadi, MA Art
History, University of Amsterdam, January 21 2014.
99 Doherty, Claire. 'Public Art as Situation: Towards an Aesthetic of the Wrong Place in Contemporary Art Practice and
Commissioning.’ In: Jan Debbaut. Out of the Studio! Art and Public Space. Hasselt: Z33, 2008. Retrieved from
<http://thinkingpractices.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/doherty-publicartassituation.pdf> March 2 2014, pp. 3, 11.
100 Doherty 2008, p. 6. Refers to Tim Cresswell, G. Verstraete, eds. Mobilizing Place, Placing Mobility. The Politics
of Representation in a Globalized World. 2002, Amsterdam and New York, NY: Radopi, pp. 25-26.
101 Doherty 2008, p. 11.
102 Guggenheim. ‘Francis Alÿs in collaboration with Cuauhtémoc Medina and Rafael Ortega.’ www.guggenheim.org.
Consulted May 2 2014 <http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/artwork/11412>, and
Doherty 2008, p. 9.
103 Although the work is executed in the desert just outside Lima.
Heartney, Eleanor. Art & Today. London and New York: Phaidon Press Limited, 2008, p. 399.

21
town Las Playas. With the firing of a human cannonball people were flown over the fence that
marked to two countries' boundaries (image 7). In this spectacle citizens were physically
crossing the literal and metaphorical line of the country from which they were excluded.104
Thinking of other art interventions that constitute itself as disruptions of space, I would like to
bring forward the work of Tomas Saraceno. In my view his works operate within the approach
of urban scenography because they can be seen as a form of reinterpretation of spatial
structures that shape the physical and emotional experience of public space. Saraceno's Cloud
Cities are quite literally an example of the construction of space, reflecting on today's public
space and proposing a new perspective on everyday life with utopian aspirations. Inspired by
soap bubbles and spider webs,105 they are enormous inflatable installations that propose a
different choreography to urban inhabitants by opening up a way to a vertical use of public
space (images 8-10).
However Saraceno's works are not only scientific test models for aviation and future living
environments. The floating installations, in the future possibly to be presented in public spaces
outside of museums, are quite literally a reconstruction of space in which a stable sense of
place is shattered. People are invited to move around on the elevated structures in which they
not only discover a new, unusual kind of public space but are also able to create a different
perspective on future public space as well as on the world beneath them. With an over-seeing
eye they can watch the urban inhabitants down below, moving in the crowds that they
normally take part of as well.
Saraceno does not just pose the idea of floating urban environments to provoke. He believes
that in the future habitats will be able to fly, and he made a lot more works that test this
vision. For Portscapes 2, an art project set up to reflect on the creation of new land in the
harbor of Rotterdam, Saraceno made in collaboration with the Aerospace Engineering Faculty
of TU Delft Saraceno a six meter high flying construction that alluded to future city planning
and modes of existence. Solar Bell (2012) was a kind of kite that functioned as a model for
floating living environments, aspiring human victory over gravity (image 11).106
The work fits within the aims and methods in urban scenography's approach to public art,
because the installation constitutes a disruptive space in public space in the sense that it is the
cultivation of what we think is not possible: it crosses the traditional boundaries of space.107
Solar Bell redirects the spectator's thoughts to an elevated use of public space while at the
same time refocusing his conscious on “the world below”, where he can imagine himself to be a
tiny being admits of different flocks of people and different paths of everyday life. From this
perspective Solar Bell could be said to vitalize a public space that has not yet been used, and

104 Frieze Magazine. ‘Javier Tellez.’ www.frieze.com. Consulted May 2 2014

<http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/javier_tellez/>, and Doherty 2008, p. 8.
105 Trend Tablet by Lidewij Edelkoort. ‘Tomas Saraceno.’ www.trendtablet.com. Consulted May 24 2014
<http://www.trendtablet.com/10319-tomas-saraceno>.
106 Stichting Kunst en Openbare Ruimte. ‘Portscapes 2. Tomas Saraceno.’ www.skor.nl. Consulted May 24 2014
<http://www.skor.nl/nl/zoeken/item/portscapes-2-tomas-saraceno>.
107 Portscapes 2. A Series of Art Projects Aliongside the Construction of Maasvlakte 2. ‘Project: Tomas Saraceno,
Solar Bell.’ www.portscapes2.nl. Consulted May 24 2014
<http://portscapes2.nl/eng/project-tomas-saraceno-solar-bell>.

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to reveal the interconnection between existing and future spatial structures and everyday life.
To the extent that the work is creating an illusion of space, Solar Bell proposes a disruptive
thought in the contemporary city by insinuating a physical and metaphorical detachment from
everyday life. This is how the work could be said to shift the urban inhabitant's everyday
perspective and to be critical toward our use of public space.
More difficult is to point out in which respect Solar Bell addresses the city's genius loci – as it
proposes an idea that addresses a practical use of urban space. However, the work in itself
does show a moving away from notions of urban decay and alienation as it vitalizes unused
space, and creates a sense of engagement and commonality in speculating about a future that
is unknown but affects us all. Moreover, with this work Saraceno investigates in expanding
ways how we inhabit and experience our environment,108 which in my view positions the city
not as a machine or set of static objects but more like a constantly changing organism we have
to adapt to. This is also reflected in the fact that Saraceno perceives the space for the
exhibition of his work as biosphere, an area on the planet where life occurs.109 Altogether Solar
Bell may contribute in addressing and regenerating the contemporary city's spirit.

108 MET Museum. ‘Tomas Saraceno on the Roof.’ www.metmuseum.org. Consulted May 24 2014
<http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2012/tomas-saraceno>.
109 Stichting Kunst en Openbare Ruimte. ‘Portscapes 2. Tomas Saraceno.’ www.skor.nl. Consulted May 24 2014
<http://www.skor.nl/nl/zoeken/item/portscapes-2-tomas-saraceno>.

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2.3 Engagement with the city
I now want to further explore the difficult matters of “engagement” and “experience” in the
approach of urban scenography to art in public space. We have seen that urban scenography
encourages an analysis of urban elements and aims for resistance to set structures and
scenarios through creating and curating public art interventions brought into space by urban
inhabitants. According to urban scenography, this is what we may understand as engagement
with the city. This engagement is intertwined and stimulated by an intensified experience, of
which Maiju Loukola gives a clarifying definition in her lecture 'Scenography Lived:
Intermediality and Haptic Visuality – On the Intimacy of Distance' at the Expanding
Scenography symposium. According to her the experience in urban scenography is to be
understood as a sensible perception that transcends eyesight and the division between body
and mind, and constitutes a “perception with the whole body:”110 it is an emotional as well as
physical experience.
Going back to the aim of urban scenography to revitalize public space and to create a more
vibrant connection between the urban dweller and his surroundings, how can urban
environment be curated through the use of urban scenography in a way that it intensifies
urban experience and emotion, and generates the city's genius loci? Like seen in Solar Bell, as
practical approach urban scenography helps to make content experiential and interpretive
within a physical environment. It writes spaces in the sense that it draws, composes, frames
and stages public space.111
According to several writers urban scenography can also be used to regenerate urban
environment in the way that it appears to play a critical role in stimulating public life, meaning
engagement between citizens. Marc Augé addresses this subject in his book Non-Places:
Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (1995). Referring to the concept of
alienation in public space, he notes that the contemporary “non-places”, places in which
individuals are connected in a uniform or formal manner like streets and supermarkets,
apparently are to be social, but they are not.112 This suggests that the feeling of impersonality
and alienation in public spaces comes forth from a detachment among citizens themselves.
According to Lavrinec this makes sense when we acknowledge it is not a coincidence that
creative actions in public space, such as flash mobs or performances, are as a rule initiated in
places that can be marked as non-places.113
Not everyone agrees this social distance in public space should be tackled. Zygmunt Bauman
for example holds a rather pessimistic view toward comparable movements of some form of

110 Loukola, Maiju. ‘Scenography Lived: Intermediality and Haptic Visuality - On the Intimacy of Distance.’ Abstract of
lecture for symposium Scenography Expanding 1: On Spectatorship, February 25-27 2010, New Riga Theatre,
Latvia. Retrieved from <http://www.theatre.lv/new/files/RIGASPEAKERS_Abstracts.pdf> May 26 2014.
111 German-Architects. ‘International Scenography Biennial.’ www.german-architects.com. Consulted April 30 2014
<http://www.german-architects.com/en/agendas/details/4541>.
Theatre Studies Utrecht University. ‘Thinking Scenography.’ www.theatrestudies.nl. Consulted May 1 2014
<http://www.theatrestudies.nl/staff_merx_projects.html>.
112 Augé, Marc. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. New York: Verso, 1995, p. 94.
113 Lavrinec, Jekaterina. ‘Revitalization of Public Space: From “Non-places” to Creative Playgrounds.’ In: Santalka:
Filosofija, Komunikacija, Vol. 19, No. 2 (2011b), p. 71. Retrieved from
<http://www.cpc.vgtu.lt/index.php/cpc/article/view/coactivity.2011.16/pdf> March 2 2014.

24
communal interest, which in his eyes are self-defeating and ultimately only create anxiety
toward strangers.114 He argues: “The main feature of the ‘public, but not civic’ places […] is the
redundancy of interaction. If physical proximity – sharing a place – cannot be completely
avoided, it can be perhaps stripped of the challenge of ‘togetherness’ it contains, with its
standing invitation to meaningful encounter, dialogue or interaction. If meeting strangers
cannot be averted, one can at least try to avoid the dealings”.115 However, urban scenography
does appear to aim to revitalize public space through a physical and emotional engagement
with urban environment as well as among urban inhabitants themselves. Theorists' views on
how exactly this engagement is constituted, differs.
In her introduction of Space and Desire (2011) Thea Brejzek argues that the concept of
engagement in public art is imperative because in her view the city propagates disengagement
rather than it shows interest in citizens' desire to transgress the normative patterns of
everyday life. Interventions like mobs do address engagement by constructing a space that
enhances social networks, but Brejzek notes that in the end they still miss the element of
critical intent, like mentioned before in this thesis.116
Brejzek then expounds on the fact that the engagement with a scene – or the engagement
with urban constructions – has increasingly been addressed in the field of scenography and
public space. In her introduction of a line of symposiums called Scenography Expanding 1-3
(2010)117 she points out a recent focus on the use of scenography as curatorial tool in the
activation of public space. Participants of the symposium discussed different ideas on how to
approach the concept of engagement in scenography: individually or collectively.
Political and public arts theorist Randy Martin for example talked about what he calls the model
of “social kinaesthetics”, which is a model of moving bodies in space. The model helps to
understand the ever changing interconnections between the artist and a global financial
system controlling his body's performance in contemporary Western society. The practice of
scenography and its engagement with urban surroundings allows a rethinking of the individual
and the societal as the single body is able to move accordingly and away from its everyday
paths.118 This approach touches the potential of the individual urban inhabitant or artist to
connect his consciousness of urban scenarios and choreographies to a personal engagement
with public space.
Brejzek mentions how curator Katharina Schlieben and architecture theorist Christian Teckert
maintain a slightly different perspective on the way the public does or should engage with the
city. At the symposium they argued that within their curatorial practice of scenography they
perceive urban inhabitants as a heterogeneous organism in relation to the power structures
that make up urban space. Schlieben and Teckert talk about “the publics,” rather than “the
public” with respect to its interaction with the city. According to the writers, the construction of

114 Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000, p. 106.
115 Idem, p. 105.
116 Brejzek et al. 2012, pp. 7-8.
117 Symposiums conducted in Riga, Belgrade and Évora, 2010, organized by the Prague Quadrennial of Performance
Design and Space.
118 Berjzek 2011a, p. 11.

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spaces that create disattachment, provocation and transformation, is embedded in and derive
from collective processes of urban activism and intervention.119 We could say this notion of
urban scenography takes on the idea of the power of engagement through collectives of
citizens, which I will address in the next section.
Brejzek concludes that participating theorists and artists of the Scenography Expanding
symposiums evidently agree on the potential of scenography to create critical narratives and
thereby proposing alternative modes of reality. The participants credit artists, curators and
spectators equally in the creation of such spaces. However Brejzek does not see the process of
curating scenography as a transformative power that provides a “cure” for alienated public
space.120 She might refer here to the concept of gentrification, which is understood as the
upgrading of a neighborhood or district on a social, cultural and economic level. Initiated by
investments of homeowners, real estate development, local government or community artists
and activists, the area changes into a community of wealthier residents and businesses,
increasing property value and lower crime rates. This usually constitutes the transformation of
a working class or vacant area of a central part of the city into a middle class residential area
with fruitful commercial businesses. Examples of such neighborhoods are the Jordaan in
Amsterdam and Williamsburg in New York. The downside to this development is that poorer
residents are driven out due to a rise in taxes and property value.121
Today artists and urban activists are considered to play an essential role in the gentrification of
urban areas. They often seem to be among the first residents to settle in poor communities,
appear to have the vision and ability to rehabilitate abandoned spaces, or set up community
art projects, which put into motion the process of gentrification.122 Ironically, in later stages of
this process the artists who initiated the transformation in the first place are pushed out by
attracted wealthier residents.123
Considering if urban scenography should be seen or used as a method of gentrification, it looks
like Brejzek does not understand the approach to be part of this process. It is rather “an
infection of ideas,” she argues, “that opens ways to unpredictable outcomes, multi-authored
propositions and previously untested speculations.”124 In my view gentrification is the
regeneration of urban environment through an economical perspective, which is exactly the
opposite of what urban scenography aims to do. We need to keep in mind the specific claim of
urban scenography to approach the city through a perspective that has little room for the
economical, rational and commercial aspects of public space while revitalizing alienated sites.
Urban scenography is better understood as a reanimation of space through perspectives that
are not colored by capitalism, but rather address an emotional engagement with urban
surroundings and among urban inhabitants.

119 Berjzek 2011a, p. 11.

120 Ibidem.
121 Lees, Loretta, Tom Slater, Elvin K. Wyly. Gentrification. New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, 2008.
122 Ley, David. ‘Gentrification and the politics of the new middle class.’ In: Environment and Planning D: Society and
Space, Vol. 12 (1994): 53–74. Retrieved from <http://www.environment-and-
planning.com/epd/fulltext/d12/d120053.pdf> June 15 2014.
123 Loyd, Richard. Neo-Bohemia. Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City. New York: Routledge, 2006.
124 See note 119.

26
2.3.1 The shared experience: a physical and emotional experience
Different theorists who reflect on urban scenography explore the concept of shared experience
in spatial composition, which claims to initiate emotional link between citizens and their
surroundings as well as among citizens themselves. Pamela Howard points out that besides
many its crowded public spaces, cities are full of abandoned spaces.125 In these sites she sees
the potential for performative interventions that encourage spontaneous public gatherings.
Howard says the connection between space and participants, both spectators and performers,
provides a fertile research subject for scenographers who are always looking for ways to
metaphorically and physically animate space.126 It is here where the task of urban scenography
as curatorial tool lies.
According to the writer, these crucial events of performative interventions cultivate a shared
history and bring the aspiration of the public in sight. Within the idea of the city becoming a
theater space, the surrounding buildings act as the scenery or background for projections.
Their architecture contains collective memories, associations and desires of the public, which
make them a vital part of the city's dramatic space and experience, and a potential element in
engaging with the audience: the passers-by.127
Howard here generally speaks about performance interventions in public environments, but I
think we can also link public artworks to her theories as they themselves can often be
described as performative and engaging interventions in public space. An illustrative example
of such interventions in public space are Krzysztof Wodiczko's projections onto facades of
urban buildings. In the eighties he became known for these large-scale public works, which
question authorial structures and politics and often include images challenging the concepts of
power and war. His photographic projections illuminate existing structures, turning the street
into a stage. Through the juxtaposition of images and architecture (often corporate and
government buildings) he addresses the city's dramatic space and hidden values embodied in
these structures.128 Thereby he touches the subjects of collective use and shared experience of
public space.
For example, with his Homeless Projection (1986-1987) (image 12) on the Soldiers and Sailors
Civil War Memorial in Boston Wodiczko entered into discussion with urban citizens and vagrants
about the homeless population of cities he visited or lived in, like New York. The caused
interaction with the public attests of a direct engagement with urban inhabitants. Homeless
Projection addresses a shared urban history as well as urban aspirations. It confronts the
public with a group of people that is excluded from our society, although they are physically
part of it. Facing this alienated group in a dramatic or artistic way, the urban dweller's
conscious is redirected to a generally unknown engagement with this group and to an over-
thinking of ways in which public space is collectively used. From urban scenography's
perspective Homeless Projection thereby addresses a rethinking of both the engagement and

125 Howard 2002, p. 9.

126 Idem, p. 10.
127 Howard 2002, p. 9.
128 Heartney 2008, pp. 381-382.

27
experience of citizens among each other, as well as a re-evaluation of the city's structures and
politics of public space.
In 'Shaping Spaces of Shared Experience: Creative Practices and Temporal Communities'
(2013)129 Lavrinec and Oksana Zaporozhets address the specific concept of shared experience
within urban spaces. They argue that creative practices increase the diversity of scenarios
attached to a certain urban place, and thereby increase the intensity of urban emotions. Urban
inhabitants are involved in creative interventions that address their routines and
choreographies, but also enhance the significance of physical contact, synchronized movement
or simultaneous emotions through a confrontation with interpretations of perspectives of other
fellow citizens. These disruptions re-invent space while initiating interaction or cooperation
between citizens. Thus the places where public art acts become what the writers call spaces of
shared experience, and touch the Situationist's “emotionally moving situations”.130
These particularly interactive disruptions remind of movements like Happenings and Fluxus of
the sixties. Not holding on as heavy to revolutionary ambitions as the Situationists did, they
emphasized ephemeral actions and playful interaction into everyday life scenarios. Father of
the Happenings Alan Kaprow initiated improvisational performances and events in which the
audience's participation was a key element. Kaprow provided the place, objects and sometimes
some general guidelines for action; the rest was up to the audience. Fluxus, a movement
whose leaders included Nam June Paik, encouraged a similar free-form that asked for
participation of the audience.131
Now focusing on today's urban environment and notions of shared experience, these might be
less about attacking the autonomy of art through participation and more about reconnecting
urban inhabitants to each other. There still appears to be a similar need for some form of
interaction in public spaces that as a quest is picked up by public art. Globalization and virtual
media have caused a democratizing of accessibility of contemporary art, but simultaneously
caused a renewed craving for a collective physical experience of art. There has been a rebirth
of the tactile, Gabi Schillig pointed out in her lecture 'The Liberation of Space and Body' at the
symposium Expanding Scenography 1: On Spectatorship.132 Through this perspective public art
may in itself take on the idea of shared experience, in the sense that it is physically and
experientially accessible in the collective public sphere of for example streets and squares,
instead of in the autonomous institutions of museums and galleries.
However, I want to argue that today's notion of a shared experience is not only about physical
interaction with the artwork and other spectators. Even more so it addresses a social or
emotional interaction. I think this perspective might be better understood through the account
of Sadie Plant in The Most Radical Gesture. Plant explains according to the Situationists'

129 Lavrinec, Jekatarina, Oksana Zaporozhets. 'Shaping Spaces of Shared Experience: Creative Practices and
Temporal Communities.' In: Oleg Pachenkov, ed. Urban Public Space: Facing the Challenges of Mobility and
Aesthetization. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang GmbH, 2013: pp. 132-143.
130 Lavrinec and Zaporozhets 2013, pp. 132, 134.
131 Heartney 2008, p. 392.
132 Schilling, Gabi. ‘The Liberation of Space and Body.’ Abstract lecture for symposium Scenography Expanding 1: On
Spectatorship, February 25- 27, 2010, New Riga Theatre, Latvia. Retrieved from
<http://www.theatre.lv/new/files/RIGASPEAKERS_Abstracts.pdf> May 26 2014.

28
critiques – which I here propose to project on today's public space – that while material
poverty disappeared with the upcoming of the capitalist society, life is still made miserable by
the alienated social relations that extend to all corners of life. Leisure and luxuries do not
provide different relations or experiences, because they are gained from capitalism itself and
can only be consumed. According to my understanding of Plant they provide us with choices
and commodities that are produced by the system itself, which in their turn reproduce the
alienated relations of production.133 While this is a quite pessimistic view of today's society, it
appears that this perspective is to some extent still valid in the contemporary city. We have
seen that there exists a need for perceiving the city as experience instead of object or
commodity. Through the approach of urban scenography an emotional shared experience
precisely addresses and rethinks contemporary social relations characterized by impersonality
and social distance.
The lack of emotional interaction in public space also becomes clear when we look at the
planning of contemporary cities. In an interview on The City Repair Project Mark Lakeman
describes how public spaces are mainly designed for transportation and commuting. Our lives
are coordinated by “the grid”, a street plan used by city planning that was to organize Western
expansion and occurred in all its cities. As familiar as urban dwellers are with these grids, they
are a very literal example of how our lives are structured by one way routes that take us from
one destination to another, with little room for confrontation, interaction, experience or
communication – evidently causing social isolation.134 This phenomenon of alienation
embedded in city planning is a clear example that shows the missing of an emotional
interaction between citizens, rather than a physical one.
Yet in an effort to adapt the concept of both the physical ánd emotional shared experience to
the intervention of public art, I would like to bring forward some examples of public works that
inhabit this kind of shared experience in which interactions become the artwork – as is striven
for by urban scenography. A very illustrative example is Daan Roosegaarde's Marbles (2012),
an interactive work created specifically for the C. van Eesterenplein in Almere Buiten (image 13
and 14). With regard to a renovation of the square, the artist was asked to create a work that
would stimulate this public space into a place of communication and interaction among local
inhabitants. It had to function as a meeting place, which would revitalize this public space as
well as give sense of a shared experience.
Marbles consists of six glowing smooth stone-like forms that were placed in the center of the
square. Specifically at night it becomes clear what they do: when touched they change color
and make sounds. They not only react to human interaction but also to each other, which is
how their response multiplies very quickly. The work invites locals or passers-by to play with
them or watch other people touch the stones, and thereby opens up possibilities of
communication or interaction with others. Marbles' characteristics show the work is both a

133 Plant 1992, pp. 2-3.

134 Lakeman, Mark, Saskia Dresler. ‘The City Repair Project: Transform Space into Place.’ Video interview.
www.article.wn.com. Consulted May 26 2014
<http://article.wn.com/view/2014/03/31/Internationally_recognized_artist_Ann_Hamilton_selected_for_/>.

29
physical and emotional shared experience. It responds to motion and appeals to the senses of
vision, hearing and touching, as well as it moves local inhabitants to interact, thereby
regenerating the desolate square into a place of social relations.135
A work with a similar aim to initiate interaction, this time in a place that is known to be the
apex of capitalism and alienated relations, are the Meeting Bowls (2011) created by the
Spanish artist collective “mmmm...” in Times Square. The Meeting Bowls are semi-spherical
capsules that were designed to stimulate interaction between passers-by by inviting them to
temporarily step out of the usual paths of the square and have them be seated faced to one
another (image 15). Because the bowls are round and only able to accommodate a maximum
of eight people, these social spaces are more intimate than typical public benches, and
confront people with their fellow urban pedestrians. Communication is almost unavoidable. 136
Situated in one of the most crowded and commerce driven places, the Meeting Bowls create
places of communication, interaction or even intimacy among urban citizens. They encourage
not only to face fellow urban walkers, but also to start a dialogue with a stranger.137 In this
sense the work positions itself as a physical as well as emotional shared experience. Ultimately
it critiques the alienated and socially distant way in which urban walkers behave in public space
in everyday life.
Now there are also types of public works that initiate a form of shared experience or
engagement in the creation of a public artwork itself. A good example of this kind of
reinterpretation of interactivity in public space is The Gates (1979-2005), initiated by artist
couple Christo and Jeanne-Claude in New York's Central Park (image 16). This large-scale
installation of hundreds of gates hung with orange fabric created a new sense of space, in the
way that it was able to change the dynamic of a historically important landmark through a
simple reinterpretation of the basic activity of walking through a park. With its high-visibility,
monumental and whimsical quality it created a communal sense of wonder that is said to have
bonded strollers for months.138 The work constituted a new path to follow in a public space that
is characterized by a more free form of urban walking compared to streets and sidewalks
through which urban inhabitants commute.
Equally important in the argumentation of this example is the process through which the The
Gates came into being for the mass audience of the city that is known for its alienation and
detachment. In a lot of their work Christo and Jeanne-Claude engage large numbers of
participants in the realization of their work, so that their authorship partially disappears and
the creation of their artwork is transformed into a collective experience. For this specific
project they did so as well. They worked together with local authorities, raised money within
the local communities, galvanized the press and enlisted an army of volunteers to help build
the installation. Given the complex negotiations of carrying out this project in this particular
135 Museum de Paviljoens Almere. ‘Daan Roosegaarde, Marbles (2012).’ www.depaviljoens.nl. Consulted May 26 2014
<http://www.depaviljoens.nl/page/54002/nl>.
136 mmmm.... ‘Meeting Bowls. In Times Square from August 16 to October 12, 2011. New York (USA).’
www.mmmm.tv. Consulted May 26 2014 <http://www.mmmm.tv/enmeetingbowls.html>.
137 Ibidem.
138 Hanly, Jack. ‘Public Art and the Shared Experience of Beauty.’ February 5 2012. www.bardcityblog.wordpress.com.
Consulted May 25 2014 <http://bardcityblog.wordpress.com/page/14/>.

30
public space, it took twenty-five years to be realized from initial concept to the opening.
Through this undertaking the duo temporarily transformed urban environment in the sense
that they created a common ground of participation, interaction and engagement among
citizens themselves.139
As we have seen, spaces of shared experience provide a new layer of reinterpretation to public
space, one that apparently is being missed in contemporary understandings of public space as
a general space of collective use.140 It is not just a ground for interaction or cooperation, but it
concerns an emotional bond, connection or engagement among fellow urban inhabitants.
Acknowledging that it remains difficult to put a finger on the essence of the shared experience
and how it relates to the revitalization of urban space, I want to add that this connection may
most clearly be understood as a sensitive or conscious way of perceiving the city that in its
turn reflects this vivacity towards urban inhabitants. As argued earlier by Kolodziej, the
development of urban space is strongly intertwined with the emotional state of society, and
each responds to one another.141 In my understanding the shared experience described by
urban scenography contains exactly the quality of addressing or recognizing the city's spirit
that is being missed in today's urban public space. The physical and emotional shared
experience could be seen as a moving away from the concept of alienation within the
contemporary city.

2.3.2 Engagement: creating consensus or agonistic pluralism? Notions of solidarity in the

shared experience
Addressing the question of how urban scenography, or the shared experience specifically,
revitalises urban space, there are different perspectives on the notion of solidarity in this
matter. In my view Lavrinec for example maintains a slightly more optimistic or unsubtle view
on urban scenography's power to revitalize public space than other theorists of urban
scenography. In ‘Urban Scenography: Emotional and Bodily Experience’ Lavrinec states that
the concept of urban scenography appears to be a tool for revitalization of underused public
spaces in the sense that it occurs through intensified engagement and experience within the
urban inhabitant. He is both physically and emotionally linked with the city's space.142 This
might be the case as we have seen this being argued convincingly by different authors;
however Lavrinec's argumentation and examples might not be as strong. To me they indicate
that not every shared experience possesses the power to critically regenerate public space.
In her article 'Urban Scenography: Emotional and Bodily experience' (2013) Lavrinec writes
that urban interventions have the ability to reanimate underused public spaces characterized
by alienation – for example sidewalks – by rearranging the construction of spatial elements
through the creation of new scenarios on micro-level that initiate socializing. These micro-level

139 Hanly <http://bardcityblog.wordpress.com/page/14/> February 2012.

Heartney 2008, p. 407.
140 Lavrinec and Zaporozhets 2013, p.134.
141 Kolodziej <http://h08.cgpublisher.com/proposals/78/index_html> February 23 2014.
142 Idem.
Lavrinec 2013, p.21.

31
interventions are introduced by urban activists and public artists as well as citizens and consist
of – for example – leaving, losing and sharing items in public spaces. According to Lavrinec,
the interactions with these objects awaken the alertness of the passer-by in a playful and
sociable way. Through it citizens become active scenographers of their own everyday
surroundings.143
Here I would like to note that urban interventions are not and need not to be necessarily as
joyful and communicative to revitalize public space as Lavrinec appears to argue. Urban art
interventions are often critical and political and therefore address sensitive subjects, that
inevitably cause dissension – or at the least discussion. In these cases they can still – or even
more expressively – create a sense of engagement, like seen in Wodiczko's Homeless
Projection.
This notion of urban scenography reminds of the described power of De Certeau's urban walker
to put up critical resistance against existing structures and paths created by space experts like
city planners and architects. Only when the urban inhabitant is receptive to this kind of
engagement with public space and fellow citizens, his eyes are opened to other perspectives
and paths of everyday life.144
Political theorist Chantal Mouffe takes on a similar perspective toward the notion of solidarity in
public art. In her article 'Which Public Space for Critical Art Spaces?' (2005)145 she sheds some
light on her view of how public art should play a role in taking a critical stance toward everyday
life. Mouffe first explains how she perceives public art “not as art in the public space, but as an
art form that institutes a public space, a space of common action among people.”146 She then
poses the debate on what kind of public space should be tried to be established through artistic
practice: a space of deliberation and consensus or a space of agonistic confrontation.147 In my
view her argumentation for an agonistic confrontation in public art aligns with the critical
interventions of public art that are pursued by the approach of urban scenography.
A certain idea about the structure of society forms the basis of Mouffe's perception. She poses
that society is not to be seen as a logical reflection of forces like production, history or
development of the spirit, but as countless temporary orders formed by eventual practices.
Because in every formation of an order a repression and exclusion of other possibilities takes
place, these orders are all political. She calls the practices through which a certain order is
established “hegemonic practices.” Every hegemonic order can be challenged in their existence
by counter-hegemonic practices.148
Now according to Mouffe public space is exactly the battleground where different hegemonic
practices are confronted with each other, although she does not see these battles coming to

143 Lavrinec 2013, p. 29.

144 Lavrinec 2013, p. 30.
145 Mouffe, Chantal. ‘Which Public Space for Critical Artistic Practices.’ Presentation Institute of Choreography and
Dance (Firkin Crane), Cork Caucus, Cork, Ireland, 2005: pp. 149-171. Retrieved from
<http://readingpublicimage.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/chantal_mouffe_cork_caucus.pdf> May 12 2014.
146 Idem, p. 152.
147 Ibidem.
148 Idem, pp. 156-157.

32
any form of final consensus.149 Following this train of thought, artistic practices can be seen as
(counter-)hegemonic practices in public space. They can play a role in the constitution,
maintenance or disruption of existing symbolic orders and structures, which is why they have a
political character.150 Forms of critical art in public space can contribute to the questioning of a
dominant hegemony or structure, a position which is in agreement with the one urban
scenography takes.
However according to Mouffe the real issue is how artistic practices aim to do this. She
explains: “Clearly those who advocate the creation of agonistic public spaces, where the
objective is to unveil all that is repressed by the dominant consensus, are going to envisage
the relation between artistic practices and their public in a very different way than those whose
objective is the creation of consensus, even if this consensus is seen as a critical one.”151 The
writer favors an agonistic approach, in which critical art makes visible what the dominant
consensus tends to ignore. This demonstrates that Mouffe would possibly be skeptical toward
art forms that construct shared emotions or experiences in the way Lavrinec and Zaporozhets
described them. She argues that public art constitutes a social space that exists of different
perspectives, and not a space of consensus. Consensus – even though critical – imposes a
particular perspective, instead of confronting existing hegemonies and opening up a debate.
However, Mouffe does not think critical art should only address the refused and the
unrepresentable. She argues that in contemporary practices there is too much focus on “the
sublime,” here to be understood as the intractable, which causes negligence in taking note of
proposals of new modes of existence and the construction of new forms of collective
identities.152 In other words, while this approach in contemporary art claims to be very radical,
the emphasis on dis-identification takes away attention from re-identification and thereby fails
to follow the nature of the hegemonic struggle, according to Mouffe. It assumes that
challenging the dominant structures automatically brings forth a previously repressed
hegemonic structure that immediately positions itself as one of the new dominant structures.
Mouffe concludes that artistic practices can only contribute to interventions of urban life
constituted in democracy, when multiple forms of interventions take place in different kinds of
public spaces.153
Ultimately it appears Mouffe argues in favor of critical inventions of public art like the way they
exist within the approach of urban scenography. However she might be skeptical toward the
level of disattachment that urban scenography proposes to resist set structures of public space
and invent new paths of everyday life. She appears to think this kind of re-envisioning would
take the urban inhabitant too much into the realm of illusion, instead of letting him focus on
redefining existing public spaces. In the next section I would like to further explore notions of
illusion in the approach of urban scenography.

149 Mouffe 2005, p. 158.

150 Idem, pp. 160-162.
151 Idem, p. p. 162.
152 Idem, p. 167.
153 Idem, p. 162.

33
2.4 Urban scenography and the representation of the invisible

2.4.1 Notions of illusion and the imaginable in urban scenography

I now want to take a step back to give a moment of thought to the overarching concept behind
urban scenography's approach to public art in shaping spaces of critical experience and
engagement in urban environment. Do these interventions of art claim to rethink public space
in the sense that they awaken our conscious toward our urban surroundings as a kind of
disillusionment, like we have seen for example in the work of Alÿs, Tellez or artists collective
“mmmm...”? These critical interventions are to be seen as disruptive objects or situations that
focus our attention specifically to the configurations of existing urban elements that form our
everyday lives, thereby inviting us to develop an individual and possibly critical perspective
toward it. Or, considering a different angle, do critical interventions of public art rethink or
revitalize urban space in the sense that they aim to break with everyday life through
expressing a representation of the invisible or the imaginable, creating an illusionary space?
Looking at the public artworks mentioned in this thesis it is difficult to ascribe them to one or
the other kind of intervention. Taking Solar Bell for example, the installation makes us
conscious of contemporary use of public space as it invites us to imagine moving around in
these floating environments looking down at the city, while at the same time representing an
illusion of a utopian public place.
While Mouffe is a bit skeptical toward the emphasis on the “sublime” in contemporary art in
general, different writers appear to believe specifically in the potential of urban scenography to
create an illusionary space in public art, a dream-like sphere in which the imagination is
triggered. We know this illusionary space to be a specific characteristic of art. In his article 'The
Art of Scenography' (1928) Corrado Ricci explains: “Everyone sees reality with his own eyes
and his own brain. This has always happened and will continue to happen forever because
every artist expresses an unreal truth, that is, he enacts his feelings. Giuseppe Verdi154 was
quite right when he said that the mission of the artist is to 'invent the truth'”.155
This being said, imaginary space seems to have received new emphasis in the approach of
scenography. As we have seen in the first chapter on this thesis the flâneur was one of the first
characters in which an opening to the imaginable and the illusion comes to the fore, although
more in the sense that for him the division between reality and illusion fades.
Recalling the theories of De Certeau, his point of view actually appoints a conscious activation
of the illusion as he poses the need for imagination to disturb or rethink everyday life. De
Certeau argues that a reflexive and resistive “practice” of everyday life, like walking, is able to
trigger the individual imagination again. He believes the spatial practice of walking can be
compared to a dreamed place. They are both to be seen as a kind of ordering of the conscious
and the unconscious. What walking and dreaming have in common is that their development is
organized as a relation between the place from which it proceeds (an origin) and the nowhere

154 One of the biggest composers in Italian opera (1813-1901).

155 Ricci, Corrado. ‘The Art of Scenography.’ In: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 10, No. 3 (March 1928): pp. 231-257, p. 255.
Retrieved from <http://www.jstor.org/stable/3050731> March 15 2014.

34
it produces (a way of going by). De Certeau clarifies: “To walk is to lack a place. It is the
indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper.”156 Thus according to the writer
moving about the city is like a chain of displacements and illusions, that together form a place
that is not physical but only a name, “the City.”157
According to Plant, today's notions of the imaginable were already prefigured in the ideas of
the Situationists. They expressed their antipathy to the society of commerce and labor through
an openness to the surreal, for example through surrealist writing like poetry. The organization
strived for a revolution through a freely constructed game in which a collective transformation
of reality took place. It believed it could challenge dominating structures and alienation with a
euphoric state brought about by a passion for the here and now, an immediacy of experience,
and a free and experimental play. Through this free play that is to be understood as playing
childhood games of make-believe, new patterns and identities could emerge. It was the
Situationists' utopian dream.158
Looking at today's notions of dreams and the imaginable, Plant uses a quote from Raoul
Vaneigem to point out that they are difficult to conceive in these modern times: “Just as it
makes utopias possible, so modern technological expertise also does away with the purely fairy
tale nature of dreams.”159 However, this is the place where urban scenography claims to be of
value. It proposes a perspective on life that both constitutes and creates room for the
imagination.
Maiju Loukola reminds us in her lecture 'Scenography Lived: Intermediality and Haptic Visuality
– On the Intimacy of Distance' (2010) that the essence of theater is founded on the showing of
what is not present, and thus today’s scenographic practices (deriving from theater practice)
invite us to sensible perceptions of that what is not perceivable with the eye. Loukola poses
scenography as a notion of “haptic visuality,” which could be described as a mode of illusionary
perception in aesthetic experience. She explains how the construction of space in a
performance calls for a renegotiation of the ontological and perceptual qualities of space, like
Doherty also described in the context of public art earlier in this chapter. She means that these
spaces of haptic visuality are not reducible to optic vision, but concern a sensible visuality and
a production of imaginary space. As I understand it haptic visuality exposes the immateriality
of materiality. Loukola argues that this is how these illusionary spaces hold themselves in all
aesthetic experience, providing charged images that can be historical as well as timeless.160
Dealing with the re-envisioning of urban space, I think urban scenography as approach to
public art also possesses this core of perceiving the invisible and imaginable. As we have seen
that urban scenography aims to draw away from the contemporary city characterized by
rationality and static objects, I think Loukola's theory could also be applied to this specific
approach of art in public space. It is not difficult to recognize that the imaginative and

156 De Certeau 2002 [1984], p. 103.

157 Ibidem.
158 Plant 1992, pp. 6, 71, 2.
159 Plant 1992, p. 71. Refers to Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, Left Bank Books and Rebel Press,
1983, p. 189.
160 Loukola 2010.

35
illusionary take an important place in urban scenography as it claims to let urban inhabitants
critically rethink public space through temporarily distancing themselves from their everyday
life, thereby revitalizing the contemporary city's experience and spirit – an imaginary or
metaphorical characteristic.
The recent use of scenography in exhibition making may clarify the position of the invisible and
imaginable in contemporary art a bit more. In Narrative Spaces. On the Art of Exhibiting
(2012) Herman Kossmann argues that the more uniform, realistic and literal the presentation
of narrative structure in an exhibition is, the less room remains for individual imagination. A
greater abstraction in the impact of an exhibition is to leave a greater potential for individual
reflection and interpretation. It tends to generate new insights for the audience that originate
from their emotional inner life, instead of their rationality. According to Kossmann, this
understanding of the use of space is also applicable to other fields,161 like I here argue urban
scenography to be one of them.
Kossmann notes this emphasis on imagination does not require the reality of the place to be
completely detached from everyday life, but it does demand a fair amount of deviation, for
example initiated through the creation of an immersive space. The key of immersing a
spectator is, according to the writer, creating immersion with critical distance. It is a type of
captivation to which the spectator partially submits, without losing his own identity. This
narrativity in space allows room for individual imagination, and is to be pursued by exhibition
makers162 – as well as by urban curators, I would add in respect of this thesis. This kind of
immersion reminds of the engagement and experience with urban space that urban
scenography vouches for. It aims to temporarily distance urban inhabitants from everyday lives
through a critical rethinking of the paths and scenarios of their own lives.
In her thesis 'Introducing the New Midway: A Study in Urban Scenography' Montblanch
mentions the importance of this intensified connection between the urban inhabitant and his
surroundings in the context of performances in public space, in my view also applicable to
some public art projects. Montblanch argues that when an artistic event is able to take over a
site, experientially it causes a consuming situation: it absorbs the spectator in such a way that
he is taken out of the sphere of everyday life and brought into the realm of illusion.
It is in these moments that we detach ourselves from the rational and ordered city and
animate the cityscape according to our own imagination and desires.163 It is a way of perceiving
the city as offered by the approach of urban scenography.164

161 Kossmann et al. 2012, p 112.

162 Kossmann et al. 2012, p. 86.
163 Montblanch 2006.
164 The contemporary need for this immersion into a illusionary environment could for example be recognized in the
round the world popularity of light festivals that create immersive spaces through illuminating urban environments,
like nighttime arts festival Nuit Blanche.

36
2.4.2 Urban scenography and desire
In the above described notions of illusion and the imaginable in urban scenography, this
specific approach of art in public space clearly seems to address an expression of that what is
not visible. It invites the urban walker to pull himself out of the everyday life and into the
realm of illusion and dream, through which he can re-envision everyday life, urban
surroundings and its existing structures. In this sense urban scenography creates dialogue
between space and that what is absent.165 I wonder if it is possible to describe in more detail
what constitutes the absent or imaginable in urban scenography.
To recall Kolodziej's understanding of urban scenography, he argued that “it stems from the
visualization of life’s script, told by our history, cultural context and, most interestingly, from
our emotional needs.”166 From this point of view a rethinking of space can help us find our
aspirations and new perspectives on public space and everyday life.167
In 'Space and Desire. Scenographic Strategies in Theater, Art and Media' (2011) Brejzek
expounds further on this matter. She relates the scenographic approach to space to the
concept of desire, which according to her holds an important part in scenography.168 Brejzek
first explains how the concept of desire has different meanings in different disciplines and
contexts, which I think is clarifying in respect to her understanding of the place of the concept
of desire in the practice of urban scenography. Etymologically, desire points us to the stars,
space, and to unobtainable places. In philosophical studies however, while playing a central
role, desire generally has a negative association. This is because that what is desired can never
be fulfilled. Contemporary art practices often challenge the notion of desire as a kind of
escapism, focusing on the transgressive potential of desire.169
Now “looking to locate the other, the elsewhere, the manqué (the missing) and the infinite in
artists’ spatial organization [...],” Brejzek argues, “it is scenography in its contemporary
reading that can provide specific, if transdisciplinary methods and strategies in the
conceptualizations and constructions of staged spaces of desire.”170 According to my
understanding, scenography is here to be seen as a practice that locates and helps
comprehend the missing or desired other. It is a way of giving shape to the illusionary or the
imaginable space. Desire is the process of imagining the elsewhere, the missing and the
(sometimes) unobtainable itself, being a place of transgression in the sense that sensible
elements of an artwork are a proposition to be completed by the spectator’s desire.171
Desire therefore constitutes the gap between an expressive artistic form and an imaginary
space – to be filled in by the individual spectator – but also constitutes the elsewhere itself.

165 Prague Quadrennial. ‘The Prague Quadrennial has confirmed its status as the most prestigious of world
scenography events: Interest in participation is very high.’ www.pq.cz. Consulted April 29 2014
<http://www.pq.cz/res/data/355/037480.pdf>.
166 Kolodziej <http://h08.cgpublisher.com/proposals/78/index_html> February 23.
167 Praugue Quadriennial <http://www.pq.cz/res/data/355/037480.pdf> April 29 2014.
168 Brejzek et al. 2011, p. 5.
169 Brejzek refers to Dollimore, Jonathan. Sexual Dissidence. Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1991.
170 Brejzek et al. 2011, p.4.
171 See note 165.
Brejzek et al. 2011, p.5.

37
Brejzek adds a summarizing note that all spatial articulation of desire articulates the potential
of desire itself. It is incomplete and perhaps unattainable: it is an orientation toward the open
and infinite.172
To further explain the articulation of desire, Brejzek describes that contemporary scenography
uses technologies like simulation, interactivity and immersion to create artistic expression and
user-participation that constitute the imaginary in the spatial practice of art. We have seen this
for example in the works of Daan Roosegaarde and Tomas Saraceno. Through the manipulation
of landscape scenography can produce an unsettling effect and aim for the construction of
desire.173 According to Brejzek, this might help explain the growing attraction for visual artists
to engage with scenographic visualization of space and time. Scenography’s approach to
perceiving reality adds a transcendent layer to the physical or static characteristics of an
object. This performative quality only comes to live in dialogue with the spectator's motivation
to explore or play with this layer of illusion or imagination, focusing on an alternate reality.174
Projecting the concept of desire on public art in urban environment, notions of the absent, the
imaginable and desire precisely regard the potential of art in public space to awaken the inner
world and imagination of the urban walker, who in his turn uses his illusive strength to
imaginatively and critically re-envision urban structures and scenarios through which he is able
to get in touch with the city’s missing spirit. To my understanding, the stimulation of the urban
inhabitant's imagination through critical urban interventions of public art has the potential to
visualize the missing or the desired in public space.
Interestingly, notions of desire, the missing and the unobtainable in context of the
contemporary city immediately remind of utopian ideas. Existing structures dissolve and we
envision a new, “better” urban world of prosperity and technological advancement, often
empowered by an extension of the virtual world. However this idea constitutes practical
aspirations of the city, which is not the kind of desire urban scenography addresses.
While it proofs to be very difficult to say what exactly constitutes the absent or the other in the
Western contemporary city, my research has shown that the approach of urban scenography in
public art takes a specific perspective on this matter, one that does not constitute the familiar
image of a technologically and productively advanced city formed by developing science and
human rationality. Within the perspective of urban scenography, the missing or the desired in
public space hold a craving for a reconnection with the city through an emotional as well as
physical engagement with urban surroundings and fellow citizens.

172 Brejzek et al. 2011, p. 8.

173 Idem, pp. 4, 9.
174 Idem, p. 5.

38
Chapter 3. Constant Nieuwenhuys: New Babylon

Now to explore the notions of urban scenography within one specific work of art, I would like
to study Constant Nieuwenhuys’ visionary urban art project New Babylon (1957-1974). Being
aware of the fact that this extraordinary body of illustrations and models does not constitute a
physical intervention in public space, I have chosen to research this work because it specifically
represents the urban scenographic concept of a disrupting urban environment while at the
same time addressing a physical as well as emotional experience of the contemporary city’s
landscape – relating to the genius loci of urban environment.
Positioned in the upheavals of the sixties, New Babylon is a utopia that addresses a
revitalization of urban public space that still remains relevant today, looking at recent
discussions that are being aimed at the dissociation against a practical and ordered planning
model, and the therewith intertwined everyday life of the capitalist city.175 This is why New
Babylon is a relevant work specifically in the approach of urban scenography to public art. I
find the work very clearly exemplifies all of the discussed notions of urban scenography in this
thesis – whereas I have found that a lot of public works represent either one or a few of the
characteristics or visions that are ascribed to the approach of urban scenography.
This might have to do with the fact that urban scenography is presumed to take a specific
approach to public space that differs from a mainly practical and economical understanding of
the city that prevails today. If it would actually be possible to realize the re-envisioning
environment of New Babylon, where a revitalization of urban space and a physical and
emotional engagement with public space would take place, this would in itself presume a
change of society’s systems and perspectives. Therefore the realization of a disruptive
environment as all-encompassing as New Babylon has not actually been possible, neither back
in the sixties nor in the contemporary city.176 If it would be possible to realize, it would
immediately lose its disruptive and critical power.
This forms the utopian power and the social-critical strength of New Babylon as an artwork. It
is not a conceivable project – which Constant also became aware of – but a place of
overthinking, of re-envisioning the concept of the city and its public space. As Mark Wigley
explains in his book Constant’s New Babylon. The Hyper-Architecture of Desire (1998):
“[These spaces] cannot be used as a prescription without being transformed into a new official
order that will itself need to be subverted. By definition, the future cannot be pictured. New
Babylon is not an image of the future but an image of what the future may require.”177
I therefore find the artwork of New Babylon will illustrate most clearly the different visions
urban scenography holds toward the contemporary city. It is a good example of a work that
constitutes and initiates thinking about ways to create disattachment from everyday life to
critically re-envision urban space. As we will see it created an urban inhabitant free from the
obligations of capitalism, wandering around this newly conceived space. It is a kind of

175 Bergen, Marina van den. ‘New Babylon: The Hyper-Architecture of Desire.’ December 1998.
www.classic.archined.nl. Consulted June 2 2014.
176 Later on Constant also became aware of this.
177 Wigley, Mark. Constant’s New Babylon. The Hyper-Architecture of Desire. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1998, p. 13.

39
character that urban scenography seems to be looking for, and whose individuality and
behavior still remains appealing to our imagination today.178
Being aware of the fact that New Babylon constitutes an immense quantity of exhibitions,
models, collages and drawings, as well as concepts, ideas, contexts, related discourses,
critiques, theories and influences – which makes the work in itself worthy to be the subject of
a thesis – I will not try to give an overview of the work to its full extent but to give some sense
of the project’s concept and design in relation to the different notions of urban scenography I
have described in previous chapters.

3.1 The concept and design of New Babylon

Constant Nieuwenhuys (1920-2005) was an artist who together with Karel Appel and Corneille,
among others, represented the Dutch department of Cobra. However in 1956 he decided to
turn his back on the art of painting to devote himself to the immense architectonic utopian
project he later named New Babylon. This postwar decade was marked by great societal
changes. Welfare increased continuously and the industry automatized a lot of its processes. A
bloom of car and air traffic caused people to be able to travel faster, further and more easily to
different places. A new relation between work and leisure left people with the greater
possibilities for personal development. 179
In terms of architecture, in the fifties and sixties a movement developed that turned away
from the popular modernist principle of architecture and town planning, characterized by
functionality (images 17 and 18). Architects, town planners and artists were part of this
movement and held an outspoken political opinion, which generally contained a rejection of the
consumption society. Being one of these artists, it is not surprising that Constant temporarily
joined the social-critical organization Situationst International, of which I have described its
context, ideologies, actions and “situations” earlier in this thesis. 180
This context moved Constant to start thinking about the meaning and appearance of urban
environment, which were for him inevitably connected to the human body and mind, or to be
seen as extension of the human body and psyche. His vision of a utopian urban environment
deals with his prognosis of a completely automatized city is which human labor has become
obsolete. This would give humans the possibility to wholly devote themselves to the
development of their creativity. 181 Constant commented in the early 1960's: "The question [is],
how the people would live in a society without hunger, without exploitation, and also without
labor. In a society in which every person without exception would be able to fully develop their
creativity. This important and intriguing question calls forward the image of a material
environment that substantially differs from everything that we can, from everything that ever
was established in the area of architecture and town-planning."182 Thus in constructing New
178 Bergen, van den <http://www.classic.archined.nl/news/9812/Babylon_e.html> June 2 2014.
179 Gemeente Museum Den Haag. ‘New Babylon.’ www.gemeentemuseum.nl. Consulted at June 2 2014
<http://www.gemeentemuseum.nl/topstukken/themas/new-babylon>.
180 See note 178.
Wigley 1998, p. 14.
181 See note 178.
182 Bergen, van den <http://www.classic.archined.nl/news/9812/Babylon_e.html> June 4 2014.

40
Babylon Constant had the means to simultaneously realize his own ideas, as well as the
Situationists’ architectural ambitions, like unitary architecture.183
In his book The Situationist City (1998) Simon Sadler points out that referring to the legendary
old Babylon as phenomenon of the modern city, it was a metaphor for the architectural and the
cultural in New Babylon. In terms of architecture, modern cities have been fascinated with the
elevation, engineering, and spectacle that the old Babylon was known for. Culturally, the
building of Babylon represents the power of collective effort in the construction of a city. In
New Babylon Constant used these elements to revive the concept of Babylon, turning it into a
utopian idea of a modern city that is technological, universal and playful.184
Constant conceptualized New Babylon as an urban environment where the Homo Ludens, the
playing human being, would live. This character would be able to individually define the
dynamic and ever changing appearance of his living environment without rules or restrictions.
He does not have to work: in this new society inhabitants would lead a nomadic existence and
could, in agreement with their desires, develop as creative beings.185 Because inhabitants are
provided with the space and freedom to express themselves creatively in everyday life, the
necessity of art would disappear. The autonomous disciplines of fine arts like painting,
sculpture, dance and theater would be absorbed in the game of creating life itself.186 New
Babylon could be seen as a Gesamtkunstwerk: created by the collective desires and activities
of its occupants one could say it proposes society as an artwork itself.187
We can see how in the concept of New Babylon several notions of urban scenography come
forward. Both are based on a belief in the interconnection between humans and their urban
environment in the sense that they are formed by one another and contain a kind of reflection
of each other. Constant takes this concept to the extreme by envisioning an urban
environment that can physically be constructed and changed according to the inhabitants’
every minute desires. New Babylon wants to move away from the contemporary city’s – and
thereby human’s – rationality, order and commerce and move toward a public space that is
characterized by free play,188 imagination and physical as well as emotional experience. This is
precisely the core of the approach of urban scenography. The work’s concept resembles the
scenographic aim to create new and disrupting paths and patterns of everyday life, led by the
urban dweller’s imagination and desire, providing him with a different perspective on urban
environment. A difference here is that the approach of urban scenography focuses on
interventions of art in public space in trying to do so, while New Babylon constitutes an urban
environment that in itself can be seen as a work of art, consisting of disruptive structures
created by its inhabitants.

183 “Unitary architecture” explained on p. 18.

184 Simon Sadler, The Situationist City, Cambridge MA and London: MIT Press, 1998, p. 122.
185 See note 182.
186 Gemeente Museum Den Haag. ‘New Babylon.’ www.gemeentemuseum.nl. Consulted at June 2 2014
<http://www.gemeentemuseum.nl/topstukken/themas/new-babylon>.
187 Buiten in Beeld. ‘New Babylon.’ www.buiteninbeeld.nl. Consulted June 9 2014
<www.buitenbeeldinbeeld.nl/stedelijk/constant.htm>.
188 As seen in the Situationists’ movement of the sixties. Not necessarily a contemporary intervention of urban
scenography but it does represent the same rejection of rationality and a commerce driven society.

41
Through drawings, models, films, lithographs, etchings, paintings and manifests Constant gave
form to his ideas about this modern and progressive urban environment during a period of
over twenty years. New Babylon represents a “vertical” living environment in urban space.189 It
would be a dynamic network of spaces and structures built on fifteen to twenty meter high col-
umns on top of the existing cities, to be extended throughout the Netherlands and eventually,
throughout Europe. This network would consist of suspended platforms and different sectors
with multiple levels, through which urban inhabitants could move around freely by foot and
with the use of elevators and stairs. The sectors would be independent from a construction
point of view, but after a period of time they would gradually grow towards each other, forming
a network on top of the existing cities (images 19 and 20).190
Being like a floating city New Babylon would leave room for the historical centers of the “old”
cities. The ground surface was mainly meant for ground transportation, automated production,
agriculture, historical monuments, nature and other elements for which would be no place
within the sectors. The roof would provide space for pedestrians, green promenades and
airstrips for air traffic.191 Supporting the network’s systems with a space frame, as Sadler de-
scribes it, “New Babylon provides a clean sheet for three-dimensional urban planning and
growth. The sectors would represent a sort of extension of the earth’s surface, a new skin that
covers the earth and multiplies its living space” (image 21).192
Like aimed for in the approach of urban scenography, these structures show an over-thinking
of the everyday paths of urban dwellers in modern cities. They provide a panoptic view on the
existing city, as citizens are imagined to be moving around on elevated platforms. It would
quite literally take them out of routine scenarios and surroundings, providing a futuristic and
potentially critical view on urban space. For example, some corridors within New Babylon
would even have lenses instead of windows to increase the panoptical qualities of the view
over other sectors or, in old cities, across streets and waterways. 193 This elevated view on
everyday routines and scenarios remind of the theories of De Certeau and the Situationists,
who believed in the potential of the urban walker to reflect on and rethink his everyday paths
throughout the city, for example through a dérive or détournement in Situationist theory. The
world of New Babylon is to be understood as a critique on the capitalist city. It could be seen
as one immense détournement in itself, moving the urban walker away from labor, rational
structures and orders that are found in city life and planning, into the realm of imagination. It
would even turn life into an ecstatic experience, according to Sadler.194
Constant believed that through the multileveled structures, that could physically be
constructed and rearranged by the New Babylonians themselves, urban walkers would be

189 Gemeente Museum Den Haag. ‘New Babylon.’ www.gemeentemuseum.nl. Consulted at June 2 2014
<http://www.gemeentemuseum.nl/topstukken/themas/new-babylon>.
190 Bergen, van den <http://www.classic.archined.nl/news/9812/Babylon_e.html> June 4 2014.
191 Ibidem.
Gemeente Museum Den Haag. ‘New Babylon.’ www.gemeentemuseum.nl. Consulted at June 2 2014
<http://www.gemeentemuseum.nl/topstukken/themas/new-babylon>.
192 Sadler 1998, pp. 129-130.
193 Idem, p. 143. Refers to Hein van Haaren. Constant: Monografie. Amsterdam: Meulenhof, 1967 , pp 12-13.
194 Idem, p. 151.

42
elevated into a space of free play, illusion, creativity and instinct. So the network of New
Babylon would consist of an endless interior space – artificially lit and air conditioned – of
movable floors, walls, partitions, ramps, ladders, bridges and staircases (images 22 and 23).
The New Babylonians would have the ability to adjust the qualities of each space: like light,
acoustics, color, ventilation, texture, temperature and moisture.195 To ensure variability and
infinite possibilities, Constant pled for neutral structures, regulation in measurements and
standardization of production.196 Anticipating on the flexibility of habitats in New Babylon,
Constant envisioned the system of mobile construction elements within the fixed framework to
be made out of lightweight products that were coming out of materials science. For example,
the Yellow Sector would have titanium floors and nylon pavements and partitions (image
24).197
According to Constant, in this constructed environment the New Babylonian could live like a
Homo Ludens, free from a world of rationality, order and labor.198 The artist explained in 1948:
“Every definition of form restricts the suggestion it projects. The more perfectly defined in
form, the less active is the onlooker.”199 In other words, the less static an environment is, the
more the urban walker can develop his own perspectives and paths through it, thereby
exploring his own creativity imagination and individuality. This reminds of Kossmann's theories
that argue that abstraction leaves a greater potential for individual reflection and
interpretation. We can recognize here one of the methods of urban scenography to revitalize
public space: to create a situation in which human beings are engaged in a dynamic relation
with their surroundings using their imagination and ability to take critical distance. Posing itself
as an organic space, New Babylon constitutes a sphere in which its inhabitants can open
themselves to an active engagement with their surroundings through a playful interaction with
it. This does not mean that free play is thé way to increase engagement with public space, but
it is rather to be seen as a representation of the refusal of our society dominated by rationality.
In addition, New Babylon appears to possess a level of tactility and sensory stimulation,
bringing to the surface the need for physical experience in public spaces described in the
approach of urban scenography to public art.200 Being physically and experientially accessible,
one could say New Babylon is a city constructed by engagement and physical and emotional
experience.
Now according to Hein van Haaren the dynamic labyrinths would provide for endless
constructed situations: life here would be a never ending chain of encounters between mind,
body, space and architecture. 201 Through this perspective the passages are not something to
be traveled through: there is no goal. Life in New Babylon can better be understood as infinite
disrupting situations set against an ever changing decor. And because no place would ever be

195 Wigley 1998, p. 10.

196 Bergen, van den <http://www.classic.archined.nl/news/9812/Babylon_e.html> June 4 2014.
197 Sadler 1998, p. 132.
198 Wigley 1998, pp. 5, 9, 28.
199 Sadler 1998, p. 141. Refers to Constant. ‘Reflex Manifesto.’ Trans. Leonard Bright and Willemijn Stokvis. In:
Cobra 1988 [1948], pp 29-31.
200 See p. 28.
201 Sadler 1998, p. 141. Refers to Van Haaren 1967, pp. 12-13.

43
the same and inhabitants will not recognize certain spaces, the modern day static concepts of
habit, automatism and routine will disappear.202 New Babylon would constitute a dynamic life of
permanent creation and therefore cannot cause repetitive behavior. Everything and everyone
moves, which would bind New Babylonians to an adventurous nomadic existence. 203
Here we can see how the work of New Babylon represents one of the core visions of urban
scenography on its intervention in public space. It attacks the idea of a comprehensive and
rational city, using the Situationists’ concepts of unitary architecture, free play and creating
situations. New Babylon frees the urban inhabitant from everyday scenarios, although it does
so in a very extreme way. It aims to trigger the imagination of the urban inhabitant to re-
imagine and rethink public space in an overwhelming fashion, in itself being an immersive,
disruptive environment that proposes a completely different society and use of public space. As
Sadler explains: “Daily life does not occur in New Babylon, it is New Babylon. There is no
distinction between design and desire, architecture and psychology, space and social life.”204
Sadler critiques that this immersive, never ending, maybe even sublime orientation of New
Babylon comes at a practical and ideological price. He says a continual dérive or détournement
is dangerous in the sense that without defenses the individual is threatened with dissociation
and will relapse into what is called “ordinary life”. Constant also realized this while working on
his project, but found a solution.
The artist believed that, above all, living space needs to respond to the individual needs and
desires of its inhabitants. Until then Western cities had been building housing projects
according to Modernist concepts, a mass production of identical units. They were driven by
economic and functional rationalism, neglected individuality and favored uniformity.205 New
Babylon would require different living environments looking at the lifestyle of constant
movement and disorientation.206 This is why Constant dispersed hotels and campsites in the
different sectors of his design. Wigley noted these were to replace the traditional living space,
the family home, the representation of a static social order and a fixed sense of orientation.207
The hotels and campsites were only to be places for rest, so that the inhabitants could take a
break from the endless play and absorption in order to maintain this kind of nomadic life
(image 25 and 26).208
Furthermore, the nomadic and creative lifestyle of the New Babylonians would demand an
independence from material cares as much as possible, which is why there would mainly be
collective provisions available. The different sectors would house some of the multiple functions
that the traditional city accommodates individually. These collective provisions would form
about seventy or eighty percent of the living space in a sector. Thereby the private and

202 Buiten in Beeld. ‘New Babylon.’ www.buiteninbeeld.nl. Consulted June 9 2014

<www.buitenbeeldinbeeld.nl/stedelijk/constant.htm>.
203 Wigley 1998, p. 164.
204 Sadler 1998, p. 151.
205 Nichols, Julie. ‘Nomadic Urbanities: Constant’s New Babylon on the Contemporary City.’ In: Graduate Journal of
Asian-Pacific Studies, Vol. 4, No. 2 (2004), pp. 29-52. Retrieved from
<file:///C:/Users/simulat/Downloads/Nomadic%20Urbanities,%20JN-2004.pdf> June 7 2014.
206 See note 202.
207 Wigley 1998, p. 13.
208 Sadler 1998, p. 145.

44
individual in New Babylon are reduced to a minimum.209 Designing these structures within the
existing landscape or cityscape, Constant sought to show the contradictions between mega
structure New Babylon and the existing cities with their separation of function in buildings and
districts.210 Not completely taking over urban public space, New Babylon thus appears to align
to some extent with the urban scenographic concept of creating a disruptive environment or
scenario in public space.
Moreover, according to Wigley especially mobility and disorientation would increase social
interaction in New Babylon exponentially. He argues that heterogeneous desires are drawn
toward each other and generate new spaces. Individual desires would merge into one dynamic
space. This can be explained through the reasoning that every transformation of the space, no
matter how small or seemingly insignificant, is to be understood as a direct intervention in
social life that sets off a chain reaction of responses of other Babylonians. 211 This collective use
of space tends to reduce passivity. Through the activities of New Babylonians, the static space
would become dynamic.212 Thus the culture of New Babylon does not derive from isolated
activities or exceptional situations, but from the collective activity of the whole population. This
is how the dynamic labyrinth is turned into an immense social space, Wigley argues (image 27
and 28). 213
Placing New Babylon within the approach of urban scenography, it is a living environment that
represents the city as a living organism – one of the essential aims of the concept – and in
which the city’s genius loci is palpable. Being an organic environment, New Babylon becomes
an artwork through the interactions and collective ways of living of its inhabitants. Because
although the environments of New Babylon are constructed by the individual needs and desires
of its inhabitants, the utopian city holds an emphasis on the collective in public space. This
perspective aligns to some extend with the approach of urban scenography that aims to move
away from modern day alienation. Urban scenography sees the potential in the urban
inhabitant to individually re-imagine and rethink public space – but also to engage with his
urban environment and revitalize it through interaction with his fellow citizens. This is why we
could compare the collective construction of New Babylon to the shared experience.
Inhabitants are emotionally and physically reconnected with each other. They respond to each
other’s constructions and needs or desires, and share the same provisions. But the utopian
network can also be said to function as a shared experience in the sense that it is physically
and experientially accessible to every inhabitant. Everyone has an equal potential and
opportunity to fill in their own life and paths through the structures.

209 Buiten in Beeld. ‘New Babylon.’ www.buiteninbeeld.nl. Consulted June 9 2014

<www.buitenbeeldinbeeld.nl/stedelijk/constant.htm>.
210 Sadler 1998, pp. 127, 128.
211 Wigley 1998, p. 14.
212 Idem, p. 165.
213 Ibidem.

45
3.2 New Babylon as a model of a physical and emotional “other” space
Altogether the above mentioned characteristics made New Babylon to be a city of infinite
dimensions, aiming to create an infinite pleasurable and even sublime experience. Sadler notes
that to enter into the New Babylon labyrinth was to submit to what Constant called its
“principle of orientation”. Constant explained: “New Babylon is one immeasurable labyrinth.
Every space is temporary, nothing is recognizable, everything is discovery, everything changes,
and nothing can serve as a landmark. Thus psychologically a space is created which is many
times larger than the actual space.”214 In this note we can also recognize urban scenography’s
approach to space in art or public environment: it rather sees it as a metaphorical space than
as an actual space, opening the dweller’s eye to invisible dimensions.215 Sadler noted: “He
rethinks the status of the ground and heads off into space,”216 possibly referencing to the
elevation of the structure as well as to the utopian character and aesthetics of the work.
Constant was clearly influenced by the exploration of outer space in the fifties and sixties as
well as the constructivist movement. Next to nylon and titanium that anticipate on future
technologies, the constructed spaces of New Babylon consist of transparent planes, glass,
Plexiglas, plastic, aluminum, iron wire, wood, and metal elements of different shapes and
sizes. They remind of industrial constructivist works. The huge webs of metal touching the
ground on a few points were clearly inspired by the metal space-frames developed by
architects Konrad Wachsmann and Robert le Ricolais in the early 1950’s. 217 Thus Constant used
both artistic and architectural techniques and aesthetics in his work, which looking at his
models and illustrations can be said to have given the work – together with the utopian idea of
elevated public space – a futuristic appearance (images 29-32). Constant commented in 1959:
“The space voyages that are being announced could influence this development [of New
Babylon], since the basis that will be established on other planets will immediately pose the
problem of sheltered cities, and will perhaps provide the pattern for our study of a future
urbanism.”218
The architecture of New Babylon above all contains very strong qualitative elements, reminding
of the physical and emotional experiences in urban scenography. The structures constitute a
dynamic labyrinth that stimulates a physical and emotional experience of the spaces by
triggering the senses as well as the instinct, imagination and creativity of the inhabitants. For
example, there are “deaf rooms” that are lined with insulating materials to impose a complete
and rare silence in public space, and “screaming rooms” decorated with bright colors and
overwhelming sounds, which would stimulate senses of vision and hearing.219 Cinematographic
plays, water games, erotic sports and dances emphasize the human body as being instrument

214 Sadler 1998, p. 143. Refers to Van Haaren 1967, pp. 12-13.
215 Wigley 1998, p. 30.
216 Sadler 1998, p. 49.
217 Ibidem.
218 Wigley 1998, p. 51. Refers to Constant. ‘Another City for Another Life.’ In: Andreotti, Libero, Xavier Costa,
eds. Theory of the Dérive and Other Situationist Writings on the City. Barcelona: Museu D'art Contemporani de
Barcelona, 1996 [1958], p. 94.
219 Sadler 1998, pp. 146-147.

46
of pleasure instead of labor.220 Although being an environment mostly excluded from nature,
New Babylon would entail some sensations of nature. Wigley explains that every now and then
the structure would open to the sky or the ground beneath.221 However most of the sensations
of nature were produced by the artificial landscape of the interior itself. New Babylonians would
cross cool and dark spaces, hot, wet and occasionally windy spaces, where they could
technologically adjust these elements according to their own desires.222 Thus they could enjoy
an intensification and disruption of nature’s cycles.223 Through all these intensified sensations
the inhabitants of New Babylon would on the one hand become more aware of their physicality,
but on the other hand move into a sphere of illusion and wonder as well. To live would be to
experience in every human way possible. Sadler argues accordingly. He says that the New
Babylonians would be opened up to their own powers and creativity. In the labyrinth there is
no distraction of rationality or destination, like so clearly represented by the grid in modern
cities and critiqued by urban scenography. Thus there can only be focus on the experience of
the here and now.
However Sadler notes it is not clear when a space is encountered. For the first time in history
the spatial boundaries of living environment would dissolve.224 This architecture was meant to
let New Babylonians float in an indefinable space that was open to their unpredictable desires.
The transparency and movability of the structures are put in service of mystery, Sadler
comments. It is an imagining of a society in which everybody is free to create his own life, to
give it shape according to their deepest aspirations.225
This idea of urban inhabitants wandering around in an indeterminate atmosphere of utopia led
by imagination and desire is precisely what we have seen constitutes the other, the missing or
the elsewhere in the approach of urban scenography. The disorientation in the immersive and
illusive environment of New Babylon represents the open, the infinite and the sublime.226 It is a
dream-like sphere that opens the urban inhabitant to the invisible and the imaginable, and
therewith to insights in his emotional life. In their free movement and play throughout the
spatial structures of New Babylon, inhabitants are confronted with their desires that are
normally overruled by rationality. They “can be”, as it were, instead of living a life imposed by
society. This kind of life makes sense of the earlier excerption of De Certeau: “To walk is to
lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper.”227

220 Sadler 1998, p. 151. Refers to Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilisation. A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956, p. 19.
221 Wigley 1998, p. 13.
222 Sadler 1998, p. 145. Refers to Van Haaren 1967, pp. 12-13.
223 Idem, p. 145.
224 Idem, pp. 146-147.
225 Idem, pp. 50, 160.
226 Buiten in Beeld. ‘New Babylon.’ www.buiteninbeeld.nl. Consulted June 9 2014
<www.buitenbeeldinbeeld.nl/stedelijk/constant.htm>.
227 De Certeau 2002 [1984], p. 103.

47
3.3 Critique on New Babylon
Although having described some of its most important outlines, it appears to be quite difficult
to fully grasp the concept and design of New Babylon. According to Sadler, the envisioned
environment is so far removed from conventional ideas that it remains something of a mystery.
Also Constant’s way of presenting New Babylon does not help us to completely understand the
concept and design of it. As the project advanced the body of illustrations and models became
more and more expansive, rather than more detailed and comprehensive. Constant texts and
images do not entirely coincide which leaves us to fill in the blanks with our imagination. The
artist often explained the context of his work rather than the content. For example, we have no
idea about the mechanical working on the environment.228
So it is not surprising that New Babylon received some critique. One of the most important
remarks is that the environment of New Babylon, while claiming to provide a city where people
can live free according to their own desires and imagination, still exercises great power over its
inhabitants just like rational cities do.229 This critique was for example expressed by Guy
Debord, one of the founders of the Situationist International, who said that unitary urbanism is
to be understood as a critique of urbanism, not a doctrine of urbanism.230 The workings of the
structures of New Babylon had too much of a pressing influence on the way the inhabitants
would live their lives, besides the fact that the utopian city in itself imposes a very specific
form of urbanism.
Constant defended his work by arguing that he was attempting to give a visual form to unitary
architecture. He was neither aiming to create an artwork in the traditional sense, nor a town
planning project or architectonic model.231 According to the artist the work should better be
understood as nothing more than a projected framework for the construction of situations and
the decor for a life of creativity and leisure. 232 The art project might therefore not actually be a
utopia, for most utopias represent a future goal.233 It should rather be seen as a way of
thinking about the structures of everyday life.
Constant wanted New Babylon to be a creative game with an imaginary environment,234 which
might explain why his manifests and mockups remain so abstract. He designed New Babylon
as a provocation, rather than a city.235 As mentioned earlier the work was not to be realized,
but constitutes a critical, playful and highly imaginative way of re-envisioning the concept of
the city and its public space. This is what makes the project an artwork and an exemplary and
inspiring work within the field of urban scenography.

228 Sadler 1998, pp. 125, 135, 137-138.

229 Idem, p. 146.
230 Idem, p. 152. Refers to Guy Debord, Attila Kotányi, Jørgen Nash. ‘Critique de l’Urbanisme.’ In: Internationale
Situationniste, No. 6 (August 1961), p. 5.
231 Although it had an influence in the field of architecture, for example in the progressive architecture of the mid-
sixties. See Sadler 1998, p. 155.
232 Sadler 1998, p. 122.
233 Miles 1997, p. 18.
234 Sadler 1998, p. 123. Refers to Constant. ‘New Babylon.’ Trans. Ulrich Conrads. In: Constant. Amsterdam.
Bochum: Städtische Kunstgalerie, 1961 [1960].
235 Wigley 1998, p. 71.

48
Conclusion
In researching our perception of public space in Western contemporary cities and the position
public art takes in it, I found one of its most important understandings to be the idea that
public space is constructed by the way urban inhabitants relate to it. Public space can be seen
as a structure that is being formed by human action, perception and behavior, but also reflects
the state of our society. Modern cities are considered to be based on economic expansion,
rational planning, order, practical grids, impersonal relations, and this characterizes urban
inhabitants as aloof, rational, alienated beings driven by commerce and distanced from their
individual desires.
A meaningful connection between urban inhabitants and their everyday surroundings seems to
be missing. Citizens move between their home, work and leisure time through the city without
really noticing their environment, blindly following the structures created by dominant powers
like politics, economy and culture, and created by architects and city planners. Simmel argued
this blasé attitude is caused by the violent impulses of the striking and never ending chain of
images that appear to the urban inhabitant as he walks the streets. He has to protect his inner
life from these disrupting impulses, a response that to some extent numbs his sensitivity and
contact with his emotions.
In my motivation to research what position public art takes in the interaction between urban
inhabitants and the public space of the contemporary city, I have found that urban
scenography is an approach to art in public space that can be of value in offering a different
perspective on the city. Public art claims to reflect on urban spaces and to contribute to a re-
envisioning and regenerating of the city, but often it is quite unclear how it does so and what
this regenerating actually means. Urban scenography appears to be an elucidating and
valuable approach in this matter. Exploring the different notions of urban scenography in the
field of public art, I have tried to conceptualize how this approach could be critical toward the
contemporary perception of public space and offer a meaningful perception instead.
As we have seen in the readings of Baudelaire, Benjamin and De Certeau, there have been
different speculations about a character that would experience the city with greater
consciousness and sensibility since the upcoming of the capitalist city. This character would
have sensitive, reflexive and imaginative abilities to create a critical distance between him and
his surroundings, through which he could raise more self-awareness of his daily routines and
personal desires – in opposition to those imposed by the structures of the city.
Since scenography is an artistic concept that analyses the visualization and construction of
space and its meaning, it lends itself as an approach to public space and interventions of art in
it. It considers space not to be an accumulation of static physical objects, but more like a
metaphorical space that is endlessly being formed by the physical and emotional experience
and imagination of the onlooker. This is exactly the kind of perspective that is missing in the
contemporary city, which is why the approach of urban scenography could offer a meaningful
perspective. It has the potential to physically and emotionally reconnect the urban inhabitant

49
with the city and thereby reanimate the city’s spirit, its genius loci, perceiving it as a kind of
living and ever changing organism instead of a practical place for societal and economic
expansion.
I have described different ways in which urban scenography is considered to do so.
Theoretically it approaches public space as a performance space, posing the “scripted
narrative” of the city (its dominant structures) in opposition of the different “choreographies”
(paths and perspectives) the urban inhabitants takes in expression of his everyday life. This is
how urban scenography reveals the interconnections between public space and its occupants,
and in my understanding perceives the city as performative space: it is the expression of a
construction that constitutes different realities of countless individuals.
Urban scenography proposes the urban inhabitant to take a critical distance from his everyday
surroundings and routines, in order to stimulate his reflexive consciousness, rethink and re-
imagine public space, and invent new perspectives and paths. The artistic actions of the
Situationists in the sixties are an example of how artists and other critics wanted to create
these detaching moments or experiences. With their “détournements” – artistic, unpredictable
and playful situations, actions and performances – they tried to disrupt and decompose the
routines and rules of everyday life to create new perspectives on the capitalist city and human
behavior in it.
Today, the activist interventions of for example flash mobs or urban games resemble disruptive
situations in public space. However they mainly draw on the elements of spectacle and joyful
and romantic emotions rather than stimulating a critical overthinking of public space.
Interventions of public art do appear to possess this critical power. According to Doherty they
disrupt intellectual frames and thereby intervene with the perception of space, aligning with
the aims of urban scenography. The utopian kite Solar Bell by Saraceno created a physical and
illusional disruptive space that proposed different, elevated paths in public space while at the
same time focusing the spectator’s consciousness on the everyday “world below” and a shared
unknown future of the city.
Besides critical distance to everyday life and routines, engagement with urban surroundings as
well as among urban inhabitants is an essential element in the approach of urban scenography.
According to Brejzek engagement has the ability to regenerate public space in the sense that it
encourages urban inhabitants to rethink the relation between the individual and the societal,
and emphasizes the physical and emotional experience of urban inhabitants. It initiates an
emotional reconnection between citizens and their surroundings, of which fellow citizens
naturally take part. This attitude moves away from urban space as a static set of objects and
structures, characterized by social distance and alienation.
However there appear to be different views on the way this engagement in established:
individually or collectively. While urban scenography emphasizes the individual potential of the
urban inhabitant to rethink the contemporary city, the shared experience takes an important
place in enabling him to do so. Engaging interventions of public art revitalize public space in
the sense that they reevaluate the collective use of public space, and cultivate shared history

50
and aspirations, for example seen in the urban projections of Wodiczko.
The shared experience takes on this reconnection with the city through stimulating a physical,
sensitive experience of public space, but in my understanding moreover addresses an
emotional experience or bond that has the potential to tackle today’s social distance and the
urban inhabitant’s practical and alienated relation to public space. Marbles by Roosegaarde
proved to be an example of a public work that stimulated the physical as well as emotional
experience, as the stone-like forms triggered human senses while creating a space for
communication and interaction among urban inhabitants. Although we have seen that the core
of the shared experience does not constitute interaction or consensus between urban
inhabitants per se, but is rather understood as an emotional connection between them, which
in its turn reflects on public space and reanimates it. Public artworks that initiate engagement
can stimulate the urban inhabitant’s consciousness of his surroundings and the perceptions of
fellow citizens, enabling him to create a different and critical view on public space.
Ultimately it appears that different writers and theorists believe the approach of urban
scenography to public art contains the potential to create an imaginary and illusionary space. It
brings forth a consciousness of “the reality” of urban surroundings and structures through a
break with everyday life constituted by the imaginative powers of the urban inhabitant. This
realm of illusion where he temporarily resides does not mean he is completely detached from
reality, but requires a fair amount of deviation or immersion. It requires artworks to create a
space of captivation to which the spectator partially submits without losing his identity and
individual imagination, so he keeps a critical distance through which he can rethink and re-
imagine public space.
Drawing closer to the ultimate core of urban scenography, I have argued that the imaginary,
“the other” or “the elsewhere” refer to the desired in the contemporary perception of public
space. The concept of scenography provides a way to locate, understand, visualize or construct
the desired or missing in space. This is how urban scenography creates a dialogue between
urban space and that was is absent. Desire in this context constitutes the transgression
between the sensible elements of a public artwork and the spectator’s imagination that is open
and infinite. It allows him to re-imagine public space and everyday life, revitalizing the city’s
spirit through perspectives that are not colored by rationality and capitalism. While it is very
difficult to grasp the essence of desire, within the approach of urban scenography the desired
or the missing in public space holds a craving for a reconnection with the city through an
emotional as well as physical engagement with urban surroundings and among urban
inhabitants.
Now it appears that artists, curators and spectators possess an equal potential to create
disrupting, engaging and imaginary spaces according to the approach of urban scenography. I
have tried to show the presence of its perspective in several public artworks. I do want to add
that I found it to be very difficult to find public artworks that express multiple or all of the core
notions of urban scenography. A lot of works contain a single element or did not convincingly
take a critical position in my view. This could have to do with the idea that urban scenography

51
constitutes a different approach to public space, that in itself would not exist if these notions
were generally known and expressed accordingly. Broadly speaking, if there was a dispersion
of urban artworks that actually would re-envision and regenerate urban space, this would in
itself upheave the perspective of urban scenography. But like Brejzek argued, urban
scenography does not constitute the “cure” of public space but should rather be understood as
an infection of ideas, new perspectives and untested speculations that embrace unpredictable
outcomes.236 This is why in my view the work of New Babylon by Constant Nieuwenhuys
proved to be such an apt example of a work that constitutes the approach of urban
scenography, precisely because it represents a non-realizable environment that only exists in
the sense that it is a place of overthinking, of re-envisioning the concept of the city and its
public space.
For these reasons the theoretical outlining of notions of urban scenography may have a more
conspicuous presence in this thesis than the case studies of public art that represent the
approach of urban scenography. I have put a lot of effort in describing the extending context
and different notions of urban scenography, while now there still remains a very exciting and
interesting awareness of this specific perspective and possibility to seek and look forward to art
in public space that to some extent resonates these perspectives. It shows how the approach
of urban scenography to public art can be of value in our Western perspective of urban space.
It offers a perspective that physically and emotionally reconnects us with our urban
surroundings, fellow citizens, imagination and desires – which reanimates, rather than
regenerates, the contemporary city.

236 Brejzek 2011, p. 11.

52
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Sous les pavés, la plage (Under the cobblestones, the beach)
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<http://www.aol.com/article/2014/05/29/l/20895246/>.

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Image 5. Francis Alÿs, When Faith Moves Mountains, Lima 2002. Photo: Francis Alÿs
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Stephano <http://www.onedaysculpture.org.nz/ODS_artistdetail.php?idartist=19>.

Image 8. Tomas Saraceno, Cloud Cities, Hamburger Bahnhof Berlin, 2011. Photo: Tomas
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Image 9. Tomas Saraceno, Cloud Cities, Harmburger Bahnhof Berlin, 2011. Photo: Tomas
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<http://www.depaviljoens.nl/page/54002/nl>.

Image 14. Daan Roosegaarde, Marbles, 2012. Photo: Studio Roosegaarde

<http://www.depaviljoens.nl/page/54002/nl>.

Image 15. mmmm..., Meeting Bowls, 2011. Photo: Ka-Man Tse for the Times Square Alliance
<http://www.timessquarenyc.org/times-square-arts/project-archives/mmmm-meeting-
bowls/index.aspx#.U66rN_l_v4I>.

Image 16. Christo and Jean-Claude, The Gates, Central Park, New York, 2005. Photo:
Wolfgang Volz <http://christojeanneclaude.net/projects/the-gates?
images=completed#.U66sXfl_v4I>.

Image 17. Le Corbusier, Plan Voisin, Paris, 1922-1925. Image: Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York / ADAGP, Paris / F.L.C. <http://cached.newslookup.com/cached.php?
ref_id=203&siteid=2170&id=2912158&t=1377351943>.

Image 18. Le Corbusier, Plan Voisin, Paris, 1922-1925. Image: Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York / ADAGP, Paris / F.L.C. <http://cached.newslookup.com/cached.php?
ref_id=203&siteid=2170&id=2912158&t=1377351943>.

Image 19. Constant, map of New Babylon, 1963. In: The Activist Drawing: Retracing
Situationist Architectures from Constant’s New Babylon to Beyond, edited by Catherine de
Zegher and Mark Wigley, MIT Press, 2001
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Image 20. Constant, View of New Babylonian Sectors, 1971. Watercolor and pencil on
photomontage, 135 x 223 cm. <http://notura.com/page/2/>.

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Image 21. Constant, Sector, New Babylon, 1970. Dry point etching, 5.5 x 12 cm.
<http://prezi.com/unfpiu8vbejf/sheltering-the-underbelly-of-society/>.
Image 22. Constant, New Babylon, 1963. Lithography, 40 x 38 cm, Gemeentemuseum Den
Haag <http://www.gemeentemuseum.nl/collection/item/197>.

Image 23. Constant, Mobile Ladder Labyrinth, 1967. Pencil and watercolor on paper, 99 x 110
cm <https://www.behance.net/gallery/The-Aimless-Reader/2032857>.

Image 24. Constant, New Babylon. Combination of Sectors, 1971. Foto Victor E. Nieuwenhuys
<http://www.artribune.com/2013/04/un-secolo-di-citta-nuove/12-164/>.

Image 25. Constant, design for Gipsy Camp, New Babylon, 1956-1958. Stainless steel,
aluminum, Plexiglas, oil paint on wood, 21 x 130 cm. Gemeentemuseum Den Haag. Photo:
Victor E. Nieuwenhuys <http://www.callthewitness.net/Testimonies/ExhibitionArchitecture>.

Image 26. Constant, design for Gipsy camp, New Babylon, 1956-1958. Stainless steel,
aluminum, Plexiglas, oil paint on wood. Gemeentemuseum Den Haag. Photo: Victor
Nieuwenhuys <http://www.yorku.ca/robb/hyper/pages/constantnom.htm>.

Image 27. Constant, New Babylon, 1957-1974

<http://ludicpyjamas.net/wp/?attachment_id=509>.

Image 28. Constant, New Babylon interior, 1960. Ink on paper, 32 x 46 cm, private collection
<http://thefunambulist.net/2010/12/22/great-speculations-new-babylon-by-constant-
drawings/>.

Image 29. Constant, Yellow Sector, New Babylon, 1957-1974. Metal, iron, aluminium, copper,
ink on Plexiglass, oil on wood, 21 x 82.5 x 77.5 cm. Gemeentemuseum Den Haag. Photo: Jan
Versnel <http://www.pinterest.com/pin/303711568592382772/>.

Image 30. Constant, Spatiovore (Space Eater), New Babylon, 1957-1974. Metal, ink on
Plexiglass, paint on wood, 65 x 90 x 65, private collection. Photo: Vitcor E. Nieuwenhuys
<http://heathkillen.tumblr.com/post/74048553689/initially-known-as-deriville-from-ville>.

Image 31. Constant, Sector Construction, New Babylon, 1957-1974. Metal, photo-montage,
280 x 160, destroyed.
<http://allfordeadtime.wordpress.com/category/miscellany/>.

Image 32. Constant Nieuwenhuys, Yellow Sector, New Babylon, 1958. Wood, metal, Plexiglass,
21 x 82.5 x 77.5. Gemeentemuseum Den Haag. Photo: Bram Wisman
<http://citymovement.wordpress.com/2012/03/16/constant-nieuwenhuyss-new-babylon/>.

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Images

Image 1. Situationist graffiti, Paris 1968

Sous les pavés, la plage (Under the cobblestones, the beach)

Image 2. Paris, student protests 1968

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 Image 3. Improv Everywhere, Surprise Torch Run, 2014
Random New Yorkers get Olympic Torch from injured athlete

Image 4. Love Padlocks, Le Pont des Arts, Paris

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Image 5. Francis Alÿs, When Faith Moves Mountains, Lima 2002

Image 6. Francis Alÿs, When Faith Moves Mountains, Lima 2002

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Image 7. Javier Tellez, One Flew Over the Void, Las Playas, Mexico, 2005

Image 8. Tomas Saraceno, Cloud Cities, Hamburger Bahnhof Berlin, 2011

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 Image 9. Tomas Saraceno, Cloud Cities, Harmburger Bahnhof Berlin, 2011

Image 10. Thomas Saraceno, On Space Time Foam, Hangar Bicocca di Milano, 2012-2013

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 Image 11. Tomas Saraceno, Solar Bell, Rotterdam 2012

Image 12. Krzysztof Wodiczko, Homeless Projection, 1986–1987

Outdoor slide projection at the Soldiers and Sailors Civil War Memorial, Boston

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Image 13. Daan Roosegaarde, Marbles, 2012

Image 14. Daan Roosegaarde, Marbles, 2012

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 Image 15. mmmm..., Meeting Bowls, 2011

Image 16. Christo and Jean-Claude, The Gates, Central Park, New York, 2005

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Image 17. Le Corbusier, Plan Voisin, Paris, 1922-1925

Image 18. Le Corbusier, Plan Voisin, Paris, 1922-1925

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 Image 19. Constant, map of New Babylon.
Top, left: Holland, 1963. Top, right: Antwerpen, 1963. Bottom, left: Rotterdam, 1963. Bottom,
right: Paris, 1963-1964.

Image 20. Constant, View of New Babylonian Sectors, 1971. Watercolor and pencil on photo-
montage, 135 x 223 cm.

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 Image 21. Constant, Sector, New Babylon, 1970. Dry point etching, 5.5 x 12 cm.

Image 22. Constant, New Babylon, 1963. Lithography, 40 x 38 cm. Gemeentemuseum Den
Haag

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Image 23. Constant, Mobile Ladder Labyrinth, 1967. Pencil and watercolor on paper, 99 x 110
cm, Gemeentemuseum Den Haag

Image 24. Constant, New Babylon. Combination of Sectors, 1971

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Image 25. Constant, design for Gipsy Camp, New Babylon, 1956-1958. Stainless steel,
aluminum, Plexiglas, oil paint on wood, 21 x 130 cm. Gemeentemuseum Den Haag

Image 26. Constant, design for Gipsy camp, New Babylon, 1956-1958. Stainless steel,
aluminum, Plexiglas, oil paint on wood, 21 x 130 cm. Gemeentemuseum Den Haag.
Photo: Victor Nieuwenhuys

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Image 27. Constant, Babylon-Domazlice (Travel Sketch), New Babylon, 1965. Ink on paper, 30
x 42 cm

Image 28. Constant, New Babylon interior, 1960. Ink on paper, 32 x 46 cm, private collection

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Image 29. Constant, Yellow Sector, New Babylon, 1957-1974. Metal, iron, aluminium, copper,
ink on Plexiglass, oil on wood, 21 x 82.5 x 77.5 cm. Gemeentemuseum Den Haag

Image 30. Constant, Spatiovore (Space Eater), New Babylon, 1957-1974. Metal, ink on
Plexiglass, paint on wood, 65 x 90 x 65, private collection

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 Image 31. Constant, Sector Construction, New Babylon, 1957-1974. Metal, photo-montage,
280 x 160, destroyed.

Image 32. Constant Nieuwenhuys, Yellow Sector, New Babylon, 1958. Wood, metal, Plexiglass,
21 x 82.5 x 77.5. Gemeentemuseum Den Haag

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