Public Activities on the Haarlemmer square

Public Activities on the Haarlemmer square: Performative initiation of participatory interactions with passers-by through Lefebvre’s critique of functionalisation of everyday life.

“When the new town has been successfully completed, everything in it will be functional, and every object in it will have a specific function, its own.” Henri Lefebvre (1962)

The project takes a performative view on Lefebvre’s critiques by focusing on public activities in the city. Following Richard Sennett a public activity is defined as one in which “strangers” can encounter each other in their differences. It is claimed that similar to the object in Lefebvre’s critiques, public activities in Amsterdam are functionalised and mostly follow commercial goals. The project aims to introduce public activities into the everyday life of the Haarlemmer square (Amsterdam) that overcome the functionalised habits. In the first part an interactive score was developed based on communication techniques inviting passers-by to imagine and perform a non-commercial public activity.  In the second part the project took a more political turn based on Hannah Arendt’s claim that a public political action is about engaging into common matters as individuals. The public activity developed, centered around creating moments of discussion of local pews among strangers on the Haarlemmer square. While the project was so far focusing on interactions in physical public space, in the future the connection to digital public space will be explored.

Special Thanks
Danae Theodoridou (coach), Kathrin Wagner (theory advisor, text editor); Pankaj Tiwari (conversation partner); Leyla de Muynck (performer), Erik Kamaletdinov (photographer); Anastasija Pirozenko (cinematographer); We Are Public, Netherlands; Gessnerallee, Zurich; Current a Space, Amsterdam;