Artistic Practice
In my work I explore natural and architectural
spaces, observe natural and architectural phenomena, and find analogies
between typologies of these natural and architectural entities. They
inspire me to think poetically about the relations between these two
spheres of our world, whereby one magically emerges and the other is
constructed. My work is not about 'The New'. As a child of our time, I
am aware that there are as many artists and architects as never before
in history. It reflects in the sheer endless number of artist accounts
and artworks on social media networks. Another observation you can make
there, is that in everything 'new' lies what is analog to something else
already in existence. Eventually, this observation concerns human
creative expression, which I believe is ultimately informed by natures
gesture and formal expression, following the logic of the planet as a
system driven by cause and effect. Here it comes to my method, a
phenomenological approach in which I never make categorizations of what
is looked at. I always look at all buildings, pillars, spaces, vaults,
caves, columns, mountains, stumps, trunks, hills, and heaps with the
same attention and the same sincerity.
Il Momento Metafisico
Video
1 min. on loop
Italy, 2016
All these things arouse my interest in the same spontaneous, impulsive way. As I look at things with constant indifference, I do not give them any definitions and no truth about what they are. I just look; and in result I can concentrate on how they are - the things I look at. I stay with them in that moment of enduring the being. It is a kind of looking at things which maybe be described as a mixture of platonic excitement and a stoicism in the sense of an Democritus, without the amazement about seemingly extraordinary things. A kind of indifferent amazement about both; the ordinary as well as the extraordinary.
Going to the beach, documenting what I observe, and transforming it to poetically describe what I felt is how I go about.
Substanzraum
Spatial intervention
3000 l water
Den Haag, 2019
Documentation: Raphael Fischer Dieskau
My work puts the known and sometimes most ordinary into unusual relationships to create new contexts and look at things with a fresh eye. My working process undergoes phases of free experimentation, reflection, and eventually selection. At the beginning of a new project, I approach everything openly, joyful, and enthusiastic; everything is allowed; I produce a lot of material from all kinds of media. After spending some time in this creative cloud, I step back to look at what I have done and produced.
Now a more concentrated phase of reflection and selection begins. I decide what products matter to me, have a poetic quality, speak to my imagination, and manifest the concepts I developed during the cloud phase.
I collect all my written material and work it into a coherent text. As I would describe my working method conceptually as 'collaging', my writing can be described as such, too. It is an amalgam of observed phenomena, inspiring literature, and own thoughts touching and confronting multiple disciplines.
Eventually, the endeavor results in a curated body of work accompanied by a text of the scope of a short essay, a pamphlet, or a short story. Text and artworks belong together, whereas the text can be autonomous or integral to an artwork.
Thrown In Various Random Directions
Installation with screens and speakers, sound piece composed of generated environmental sounds, field recordings and voice.
Narration: Mabel Calvert Verbruggen
45 min.
2020
Photography: Charlotte Brand
"A thunderstorm is approaching from afar, saturating the atmosphere with moisture, making it soft and wet. Clouds are hanging low and the sun is about to go. Light-waves arriving from million miles away diving into this massive liquid body, scattering, thrown in various random directions, embracing your world with deep purple."
Thrown In Various Random Directions is such an example where my writing merges with my art practice. It exists as a quadro-phonic, spatial, installation; an 45 min. audio piece; an essay; and as well a geo located audio walk in the dunes of Westduinpark in The Hague, where I live and work.
SELECTED WORKS:
Books which inspire me:
A Man Asleep, Georges Perec;q
Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard;
Le Corbusier: The Architect on the Beach, Niklas Maak.
Artworks which stun me:
Crown Fountain, Jaume Plensa;
Umbrellas, Christo and Jeanne-Claude;
The Dome of Santa Maria del Fiore, Filippo Brunelleschi.
Other people about me and my work:
"Don’t try to pin Alexander down, because he won’t pin you down, either.
A dreamer, a traveler, a thinker, a seeker, Alexander tries to see behind the surface.
To study and describe what he feels is there.
This is the journey he will take you on; a journey as old as mankind."
Merel Boers, historian, linguist, and writer.
"Architects tend to talk and write more than they build, because it takes an effort before you get the expensive assignment. As an architect, Alexander can write, no doubt. But what he learned the past years, and that’s how he used his studies perfectly, is how to listen. That fabulous fact made him change from seeing space as something to use at will into an entity to listen to and react to. Alexander might have become something of an anti-architect — someone who is not filling space with things, but embracing space to leave it, and emphasize its existence as such. Alexander did not only initiate wonderful events-in-space during his studies, but he also re-worked them in a portfolio that does not only clarify his ideas in a consistent way, but also functions as a manifest towards how we could experience space as such."
Taconis Stolk, Head of Department ArtScience Interfaculty.
Il Momento Metafisico
Video
1 min. on loop
Italy, 2016
All these things arouse my interest in the same spontaneous, impulsive way. As I look at things with constant indifference, I do not give them any definitions and no truth about what they are. I just look; and in result I can concentrate on how they are - the things I look at. I stay with them in that moment of enduring the being. It is a kind of looking at things which maybe be described as a mixture of platonic excitement and a stoicism in the sense of an Democritus, without the amazement about seemingly extraordinary things. A kind of indifferent amazement about both; the ordinary as well as the extraordinary.
Going to the beach, documenting what I observe, and transforming it to poetically describe what I felt is how I go about.
Substanzraum
Spatial intervention
3000 l water
Den Haag, 2019
Documentation: Raphael Fischer Dieskau
My work puts the known and sometimes most ordinary into unusual relationships to create new contexts and look at things with a fresh eye. My working process undergoes phases of free experimentation, reflection, and eventually selection. At the beginning of a new project, I approach everything openly, joyful, and enthusiastic; everything is allowed; I produce a lot of material from all kinds of media. After spending some time in this creative cloud, I step back to look at what I have done and produced.
Now a more concentrated phase of reflection and selection begins. I decide what products matter to me, have a poetic quality, speak to my imagination, and manifest the concepts I developed during the cloud phase.
I collect all my written material and work it into a coherent text. As I would describe my working method conceptually as 'collaging', my writing can be described as such, too. It is an amalgam of observed phenomena, inspiring literature, and own thoughts touching and confronting multiple disciplines.
Eventually, the endeavor results in a curated body of work accompanied by a text of the scope of a short essay, a pamphlet, or a short story. Text and artworks belong together, whereas the text can be autonomous or integral to an artwork.
Thrown In Various Random Directions
Installation with screens and speakers, sound piece composed of generated environmental sounds, field recordings and voice.
Narration: Mabel Calvert Verbruggen
45 min.
2020
Photography: Charlotte Brand
"A thunderstorm is approaching from afar, saturating the atmosphere with moisture, making it soft and wet. Clouds are hanging low and the sun is about to go. Light-waves arriving from million miles away diving into this massive liquid body, scattering, thrown in various random directions, embracing your world with deep purple."
Thrown In Various Random Directions is such an example where my writing merges with my art practice. It exists as a quadro-phonic, spatial, installation; an 45 min. audio piece; an essay; and as well a geo located audio walk in the dunes of Westduinpark in The Hague, where I live and work.
SELECTED WORKS:
Metaphysics
of Architecture,Books which inspire me:
A Man Asleep, Georges Perec;q
Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard;
Le Corbusier: The Architect on the Beach, Niklas Maak.
Artworks which stun me:
Crown Fountain, Jaume Plensa;
Umbrellas, Christo and Jeanne-Claude;
The Dome of Santa Maria del Fiore, Filippo Brunelleschi.
Other people about me and my work:
"Don’t try to pin Alexander down, because he won’t pin you down, either.
A dreamer, a traveler, a thinker, a seeker, Alexander tries to see behind the surface.
To study and describe what he feels is there.
This is the journey he will take you on; a journey as old as mankind."
Merel Boers, historian, linguist, and writer.
"Architects tend to talk and write more than they build, because it takes an effort before you get the expensive assignment. As an architect, Alexander can write, no doubt. But what he learned the past years, and that’s how he used his studies perfectly, is how to listen. That fabulous fact made him change from seeing space as something to use at will into an entity to listen to and react to. Alexander might have become something of an anti-architect — someone who is not filling space with things, but embracing space to leave it, and emphasize its existence as such. Alexander did not only initiate wonderful events-in-space during his studies, but he also re-worked them in a portfolio that does not only clarify his ideas in a consistent way, but also functions as a manifest towards how we could experience space as such."
Taconis Stolk, Head of Department ArtScience Interfaculty.