If You Listen Closely You Can Hear The Leakages Talk
a contribution by Philippa Driest
Section drawing From the Poortgebouw archive.
Philippa Driest is an artist, initiator of KIOSK Rotterdam and member of Poortgebouw. She was part of the first year of WHW Akademija, Zagreb, recently finished her MA at the Dutch Art Institute, and BAK Fellowship for situated practice. Her recent research practice revolves around topics of maintenance, community and policy, influenced by her experience of being part of the Poortgebouw and working in collaboration with City in the Making. In her work she explores different sites of contamination and leakage through publishing and research installations.
If you listen closely you can hear the leakages talk
Something seeping through the cracks
Was it in the shower
Or in the bathroom
In the corner of the attic
At the brim
Sliding along the pipes?
This time it wasn’t me
I have roamed these pipes for ages
The mould feeds on me
A complex complex, wandering inside
this structure and after all these histories still losing my way
What type of heritage is here maintained?
He returned, bronzed and shiny
While he was trying to keep afloat
Will I haunt forever?
Something is going to happen!
How to keep alive and liveable?!
If the state controls the rights, how to maintain agency
when fillers are policymakers' favourite tool
Any right given can be taken away
Although the water is shallow
and they can see the temporary solutions underneath the surface
Could they hold the house underwater to
witness where the bubbles come from?
For now, they are keeping this building afloat
with a practice of 'community', abandon the ship
I want to be known, for property should not be owned
Let me be contained, as I am free
living in collectivity
I will be slipping through the seams
They will only see the lake
at the base, where I can be collected as whole
on the flat surface,
where drops are joining the river
Was it the shower?
Shower: wasn’t me!
Was it the sink?
Sink: it wasn’t me!
Was it the toilet?
Toilet: it wasn’t me!
The broken washing machine tap?
Tap: it wasn’t me!
The community is on a constant hunt for leakages and cracks, being haunted by possible eviction threats. The community and the leakage start having an affair; the leakage starts to crave attention and hopes to be noticed by the community. The leakage, as a result of neglected maintenance, is a tactic by the owner to slowly and invisible deteriorate the building in order to displace the community and safeguard their assets for a profit-motive. It represents the struggle of the community and the possible threat of eviction in the financial speculation by the owners.
These texts could not have been written without the support and endless conversations with friend and researcher Louwrens Botha.
Section drawing from the Poortgebouw archive.
For the past seven years I have been part of the housing community “The Poortgebouw” in Rotterdam.
The Poortgebouw, meaning gatebuilding, is a monumental building located on the south bank of the Maas river. The building was squatting in 1980 and after two-four years the group who squatted the Poortgebouw negotiated a rental contract which meant the legalization of the squat. We currently live here with 30 people.
Lodewijk Pincoffs, who was a “port baron”, politician and businessman, had the building built in 1879 as headquarters for his trading company, managing dozens of colonial “trading posts” in West-Africa and on the riverbank of the Congo. Pincoffs left the Netherlands before it was finished, fleeing to America to escape his huge debts from trying to keep his colonial enterprises afloat. In the 1990’s a statue of Pincoffs was erected next to the building with the title “A spectacle of so much glory and so much shame”. This historical entanglement situates the Poortgebouw and its occupation(s) in a longer timeline of political and economic struggles and tensions; this makes it an especially interesting setting for the current struggle of a community against displacement by financial forces.
The Poortgebouw is part of complex and intertwined dynamics of urban development, capitalism, colonialism, housing, and the financialization of the city; at the same time it represents the struggle for autonomy, access to space, and ways of living beyond the profit-motive. The importance of “maintenance” emerges out of this as a dual imperative: on the one hand, maintenance as an ongoing social process of making community, working for your collective survival and your right to continue; on the other hand, maintenance in the literal sense as the work, care and money it takes to keep a building liveable. The cracks in the Poortgebouw represent an intersection between these meanings as a subject of internal conflict, of struggle by the community against the owners and their subjugation (and potential eviction), and a factor in the financial speculation by the owners. To maintain their asset is to invest in their future profits, which means ultimately to displace the community, who need the maintenance in order to keep living there.
The ongoing occupation of the building by a community that continues to look for a way of living together outside of the individualized norm of living coincides with the continuous battle for lower rent accomodations. The Poortgebouw itself is a provocation to new policy norms in the municipal governance of housing, community, and the market, and their changing relationships to each other.
Philippa Driest. Photo by Louwrens Botha.