On Kiezwege | On Willem Besselink

I.
See those people walking along your street? The postman, a young man pushing a pram, a lady in her car, some youngsters with headphones on bicycles, an old man on his daily stroll… Mere strangers mostly, but sometimes we recognize them, because they are regular passers by. For a moment they’re here, within view. Then again, they are gone, strangers again.
Slowly but surely, their footsteps and tyre tracks, leaving hardly perceptible traces that gradually hollow out the pavement, form invisible ‘webbings’, imperceptible ‘drawings’.
Where have these people come from, where do they go? What would we know about those unknown yet familiar faces if we would know their destinations? Suppose we’d follow them?

II.
For his ‘Kiezwege’-project, visual artist Willem Besselink (“mainly working on site- and situation specific installations”) does just that. Discretely, so as not to influence them, he follows random people passing by his observation post as they walk or ride the streets, up till the moment they enter a building or a bus, or simply leave the neighbourhood. It’s all about observing and gathering information, but not like a secret agent would – this is input for art projects. By noting down their trajectories, these anonymous passers-by unknowingly provide Besselink with sets of data, the stuff that he makes his art of.
For the first Kiezwege-project in Berlin (July 2007), Besselink discretely followed 129 random people walking by. He translated their trajectories into 129 2D sketch-drawings, all individual and different, yet with a communal grid – the neighbourhood street plan – and one common ‘base-line’ – the street from where Besselink started out on all his observations. These data he used to build a 3D installation. The number ‘129’ was dictated by the height of the exhibition venue – a floor of a vacant warehouse – and by the decision to build the installation out of 22x22 mm blank wooden sticks. These transposed the pencilled traces of each of his sketches into tangible material lines. Besselink piled them on top of each other, starting from the floor and reaching all the way up to the ceiling. The communal ‘base-lines’ of all walks provided one side of the installation with something of a solid plane; at the other sides, the individual trajectories, superimposed, scurrily reached out into space in all directions, like a 129-armed octopus would. Apart from this installation, Besselink later elaborated his original sketches into framed drawings (10 realized out of a potential series of 129). They share a schematized superimposition of all 129 trajectories: 128 being marked in black ink, with always one single trajectory being marked in red ink – thus individualizing each drawing within the series.
For his ‘Kiezwege Kunstkerk’-project in Dordrecht/NL (April 2008), Besselink more or less used the same procedure. Preparation time being rather limited, quite unlike the given space – the interior of a former church, surrounded by four streets – Besselink made an a priori decision to build a 1 x 1 x 4 meter installation, based on a 10-minute registration of all traffic passing the church in chronological order. Squared wooden beams in different colours to represent the various modes of traffic (pedestrians, bicyclists, car-drivers and mopeds) were strung between four vertical steel wires in the exact chronological order in which the traffic had passed by the four streets. Variations in density of the four sides of the tower-like structure were both the result and a schematized representation of variations in density and modality of the traffic observed.
In June 2009, Besselink did a ‘Kiezwege’-project in Chambéry/France. In July 2009, Besselink once more adopts a similar procedure for a solo-show in his hometown Rotterdam/NL. The mode of observation adapted to the specific location, and the data thus gathered being of a different nature than those in Berlin, Dordrecht and Chambéry, the resulting artwork once more takes on a different shape.

III
As a visual artist, dealing – as all artists do – with daily reality surrounding us, Willem Besselink tries to keep away as far as possible from subjectivity and from preconceived notions of visual beauty as an end in itself. His aim is to discover patterns and systems underlying the apparent chaos; he employs an objectified, detached, semi-scientific way of observing and registering the world. Besselink thus fits into the tradition of classic Minimalism of the 1960’s. With it, his work shares an abstract purity of method. Always rooting in specific situations, and thus ‘site specific’ in a way, his works sing themselves loose from concrete reality, transcending specific time & place, into autonomous shapes. Sometimes, and without that being a premeditated aim or goal, these acquire a poetic beauty on their own accord.