Jean Klare opende vrijdag 15 november de tentoonstelling 'Practising Structures: Deventer (49+1)' van Sachi Miyachi. Jean Klare is beeldend kunstenaar, cartograaf en grafisch ontwerper. Zijn openingswoord vind je hieronder en is in het engels geschreven. 

Thank you for votunteering some of your time to listen to me talking. I was reqested to say a few words to open the exhibition. I find this is strange ceremonial custom. It would imply it is somehow not open now, which obviously is not the case. And it would also mean that I might be the type of person who could deny access, which is obviously also not the case. But it will be my honor to speak a few words anyway. I will make it short. 

On an occasion as this, one first might be tempted to describe or explain the work on display. This seems inappropriate to me, it would subjugate it in a way. 

The late artist Eli Content said: Any pretence we might have to know what we’re talking about, deminishes the mystery. 

So, I do not want to do that. In stead, I would like to share a few personal thoughts that occurred to me, when I previewed the work and had the pleasure to meet the artist, Sachi Miyachi. 

For those of you who do not know me, I am a local designer, and cartographer of ideas. I was not born here, but I have lived here for over half of my life. Deventer is a place with a long history, this is obvious. Old stuff everwhere. But most of the time, it actually feels mostly hidden to me. When I walk the streets I like to imagine what it would have looked like here, before it had a name. Just a kilometer that way: there were only a few sanddunes along a river, some shrubs. Some trees under a low grey sky. A weary traveller might have put down his sack under a old skewed stump, rested, built a shelter. After that, a hut, maybe. Others joined. The rest is history.  

'Practising Structures: Deventer (49+1)' | Sachi Miyachi

I often try to erase all the buildings in my mind, and I try to see the place before it was a place. I usually fail. Sometimes I look at a brick in the old fortifications, or in one the cathedrals and I imagine an unobstructed view and the bricklayer who laid it there to block it. But how hard I strain my imagination, I can’t see him, and I cannot unsee the buildings. Buildings and walls are very stubborn things, too robust even to be imagined away. 

Sometimes you get a peek, when there’s an archaological dig. The pavement and layers of soil and time are pulled back so you can see into the earth and into the no longer living history of long gone strangers. 

This is just like when fixing up an old house, you find a corner of wallpaper that you can peel off to see older wallpapers, revealing patterns that were looked at by eyeballs of the people who occupied the space before you. And if you’re lucky, under those you find newspapers, with dates and stories that were alive in the time that is no longer here.  

 'Practising Structures: Deventer (49+1)' | Sachi Miyachi

Humans organise spaces, access and movements with roads, alleyways, walls, floors, roofs, doors, windows, stairs, elevators and escalators. Suddenly you cannot go somwhere, or you can where you couldn’t. This material structure shapes the way we move around, trace our lives paths and weave these threads, interweave them with eachothers threads, and with our ancestors’ threads. It’s a collective texture of movements and stories that connects centuries all the way back to the footsteps of the traveler with the sack. (By the way, this narrative texture includes the pattern we together are currently collectively weaving in this space.) 

This narrative texture may just be imaginary, but I think it defines a place as much as the pattern of steel, wood, bricks and mortar, communication infrastructure and sewage dispposal. Our living spaces are indeed as much a narrative pattern, as a architectural structure. 

Things change. Buildings are crushed to rubble, raised to the ground, views are obstructed or blocked, walls are wallpapered, or re-painted, bridges, new roads are built, or abandoned, rails are laid, or ripped out, industrial buildings are refitted to become art spaces, fields vanish under new homes or newer industrial buildings, lives end, stories vanish, lives begin, new stories are made. 

In all of this, things are left behind, forgotten, loose threads, neglected or hidden like old news under wallpaper. These are treasures, if you can find them. 

Sachi Miyachi uncovered and brought some of these treasures in here and breathed life into pieces of the texture we inhabit. This is a wonderful thing which I hope will inspire you, like me, even more to never stop peeling at loose corners of wallpaper, never to stop looking. But let’s start looking here. 

Jean Klare
d.d. 15 november 2024

De tentoonstelling Practising Structures: Deventer (49+1) is nog tot en met 5 januari 2025 te zien in Kunstenlab >>