City in the Making started from opening vacant buildings to the wider community and making them affordable. These buildings are crucial to the current economy, they are commodities rather than the speculative real estate that brought about the 2008 financial crisis. People need spaces from which to operate and City in the Making (SidM) is now bringing these buildings back into use. They are a mix of living, working and community space with the idea that they can become self-reliant and economically more robust. They are not just there or their own sake but for the street and for the neighbourhood and ultimately for the city. SidM have these buildings for different amounts of time, between 3 and 10 years as collateral gained from the ‘crisis’ bringing real estate out of the market and into a common resource pool. It is exciting to imagine what are they going to achieve in this time?
Monday evenings are Neverland Cinema nights at Pieter de Raadtstraat, one of the building sof SidM. Neverland is an independent not-for-profit local cinema ‘squatting’ on the groundfloor of Stokerij (Stoker House) https://stokercinema.wordpress.com. Neverland was set up to bring people together once a week and create discussion. The movies they choose are themed monthly and these themes are topics that concern and interest the group that could spark discussion.
The series for the month was cinema itself and the film this Monday was Soviet documentary ‘Man with a Movie Camera’ (1929) which features edited footage created by Dziga Vertov and filmed in Moscow, Kiev, Kharkov and Odessa. The narrative shows life in the Soviet Union an features people going about their daily lives in a variety of occupations seen through camera lens. It is incomparably modern in its approach with experimentation in film collage, pattern and shadow and dare-devil filming techniques. The film at the same time wows the viewer with its magic and demystifies itself showing how the film is cut and frames are put together as well as showing the people filming and the camera itself. It is an extraordinary and beautiful film. http://www.openculture.com/2014/09/eight-free-films-by-dziga-vertov.html
I arrived early and bumped into Christine who I had arranged to meet on Thursday. No-one was about so we decided to cycle round the corner and go for tea. She and her husband are interior designers and she told me about her incredible past few months, moving with a 6 year old and new baby to one of the houses in City in the Making in order to deconstruct it completely … but I will tell you more later as my visit to this house will be later in the week.
Back to the Neverland – Klodiana Millona is the person behind this fantastic project and on the day I visited she had just graduated with an MA in architecture. Her parents had travelled from Albania to celebrate with her and were staying in the Penthouse Flat, also part of Stad in de Maak. She told me she had come along to see the space on the recommendation of one of her lecturers Erik (one of the SidM directors) and was attracted by being able to live and work in the same space. She loved the empty space and together with friends (also students) who were also interested in being a part of the experiment, they tried to decide what to do in it and came up with the idea of the Cinema. They wanted to do something which stimulated conversation so they decided to put on films.
Erik had already sourced a few of old cinema chairs and so they went about collecting more from the same source (sitting on these for the hour and a half film I can vouch for the chairs being incredibly comfortable!) Klodi said they had tried various arrangements the first with the screen being behind the shop front where the audience essentially look out to the street. The current arrangement is working well with the cinema being up some steps and elevated at the back of the space. The space is also being used for talks and one of their big successes was having a visiting lecturer (who loved it) come to give a talk to students. Programmed every week, Klodi says they now have a regular audience and curious new people come along too. She thinks that part of its success is because it is free. Drinks are offered at a 2 Euros for either beer or wine and when I visited there were shots of homemade rakia to follow and an Albanian spanakopita. I loved the laid-back vibe with people hanging out both inside and on the street benches before and after the film and everyone incredibly friendly and interested in what each other was doing. Around midnight people started to leave and I cycled home on a high thinking about where we might have our own cinema space in the Generator.
