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| A Social Research in the Bijlmer |
| Archaeopteryx out to protect high rises in Amsterdam South East |
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The art group Archaeopteryx from Izhevsk will conduct a social research in the streets of the Amsterdam South East district ("De Bijlmer") this Saturday, near Metro station Ganzehoef. Archaeopteryx want to execute their project PACKING on the blind facade of one of the large High-rises of the Bijlmer district, called "Geldershoofd". In the streets they will be asking passers by if they would like to live in a house protected by a large "Handle with care" sign?
Are the residents of Geldershoofd interested to have the symbol on their house?
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About PACKING:
Their project PACKING was presented at the Cultural Capital, 2001 festival. The idea of the Package action was to paint 9-storey housing blocks (the traditional Russian standardised housing "boxes") in Izhevsk with protection labels, normally used on transport boxes. The labels give notice of special requirements during transportation and usage. The action Package uses the standardised visual language of commodity circulation to redirect the attention to the residents these "boxes". The relation of these labels to the objects they were meant to protect now seems projected onto the people themselves, as if urging to protect people: DO NOT WET, DO NOT BREAK, HANDLE WITH CARE.
This humorous intervention acquires a second layer of meanings when situated in the Russian context where several explosions in similar living blocks, ascribed to fundamentalist terrorists, became an incentive to step up Russian military efforts in Chechnia
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