The Utrecht-based artist Bart Lunenburg’s research resulted in the exhibition This Creaking Floor and All the Ceilings Below – which is on view as of March* at FOTODOK and Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons. Following this exhibition, a publication of the same name will be presented in which this research will play an important role. For this book, which will be published in collaboration with Fw:Books, Bart Lunenburg started a crowdfunding campaign.
This Creaking Floor and All The Ceilings Below is the title of the publication that constitutes the collaboration between artist Bart Lunenburg, graphic designer Hans Gremmen and publishing house Fw:Books, with text contributed by Taco Hidde Bakker. The publication thereby draws together different media and disciplines, such as photography, scale model building, sculpture, video, drawing, architecture and cultural heritage.
The publication is approached as an edifice in and of itself and takes the ‘enfilade’ as a point of departure for the spatial layout of the book. In architecture, an ‘enfilade’ is a sequence of linked rooms that lie on one line, without there being a hallway through which to access the next rooms. The enfilade is a conceptual outline that stems from previous works of Lunenburg, such as the Doorzonsculptuur (2017) and the video work Marching Walls (2017). This spatial formation also figures directly into recent work, such as the installation Room with doors (2020) in Lunenburg’s exhibition This Creaking Floor and All the Ceilings Below.
Bart Lunenburg, Doorzon, 2017
Bart Lunenburg, Doorzon, 2017
Room with doors (2020) is a work that engages with the architectonic design and layout of the former 19th-century school building in which FOTODOK and Casco Art Institute are housed. The different classrooms of the school are oriented in such a way that all entry doors face each other and, as such, form one long axis. In this kind of “portico” school, there are no traditional hallways that separate the classrooms from one another. Instead, only the stairways between the classrooms provide access to other parts of the building. This enabled a teacher, or, in this case, a catholic cleric, to open all the doors in the building and thereby control all the movements of the pupils through the school.
Bart Lunenburg, installation overview Room with doors, 2020, This Creaking Floor and All the Ceilings Below, FOTODOK / Casco Art Institute
The book unfolds as an imaginary building, in which leafing through the pages is like entering different hallways, exhibition halls and wings. A book that lends itself to a non-linear routing through its constructs. A visitor/reader can enter the enfilade through multiple entryways or starting points and go on to wander through its interior. On a more symbolic level, the enfilade can refer to the pages of a book, the rooms of an exhibition space or museum, or as a route through a labyrinth or the urban grid.
Do you want to support this book? Through crowdfunding platform Voordekunst you can contribute to the crowdfunding for the book.
* This exhibition is currently temporarily closed due to measures pertaining to the coronavirus.
