naming & labelling

Taping off the labelling space.

Breda, Netherlands 2008

naming & labelling is a collaboration which emerged from the en:countering residency (add hyperlink) in Breda. Artist & Trickster, Ieke Trinks (add hyperlink), who at that time dressed in red, carried around an old visual dictionary. I became fascinated by this, in particular with the diagram of a spoon which had five labels naming the different parts of it. We talked about this human preoccupation with labelling and categorising anything and everything. A performance/installation piece took shape.

We taped off a section of the façade of a house and invited passers-by to name and label anything and everything within that area.

It was a way of engaging passers-by in conversation (“But why are you doing this?” was/is a common question), a way of inviting people to stop in their tracks and look around at their environment, and a way of drawing attention to this preoccupation with naming & labelling.

It also became a way of engaging passers-by in conversations with each other. In Breda, Ria, the house-owner, was ecstatic about being involved and often came out of the house to chat, discussing the meaning of art in this context with passers-by