Trading, Tracing, and Telling Stories: The Alchemies of Exchange Dam Square at Rodkin, Amsterdam, NL

Exhibition: Conceiving the Plan: Nuance and Intimacy in Civic Space
Lead: Catherine Venart
Team: Celina Abba, Alice Bardos, Paulette Cameron, Sarah Reid, Sarah Yoes
Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Italy - 2021
Cooper Union, New York, USA - 2022
Architecture
︎︎︎Link

“The exhibition presents twelve civic architecture projects for twelve different localities by twelve architects, side by side with videos that feature the late architect and longtime Cooper Union professor Diane Lewis. The videos—presented publicly for the first time at the Biennale 2021—thus confront the diverse proposals exhibited and bring them into a contemporary dialogue with the literary dimension of architecture.”

The project, an inhabited Monument to the Alchemies of Exchange, situates exchange as a fundamental transformational act, embedded in constructive processes foundational to the existential essence of the Netherlands. It uses an expanded notion of the palimpsest to trace the alchemic processes of the deep surface. The monument situated in Amsterdam at the origin of the city, symbolically positioning ‘rite and myth’ against claims of ownership connected to the history of power. Its architecture -- an alchemic frame of time and space -- acknowledges this original theft and resurfaces, interprets and activates storied matter as alchemic processes, both physically and psychologically. It positions us between the global and individual consciousness, concentrating and reflecting light in shadow. It marks out time and creates parallax between elements, illuminating and holding in the balance -- symbols of erasure -- through a relational turning of perceptions upside-down and inside-out.

At the end, a question remains: What has this wrought? Is devastation in environmental terms, exploitations of resources and the degradation of fellow human beings worth it?