Arte Habitable, Amsterdam, 1995

Programme: living/working experimentally together for 2 months. One month an open hours for guests. Deurloostraat 35, Amsterdam.

The project Arte Habitable was an experiment. Four young artists, Alicia Framis, Lin de Mol, Michael Nitschke and Patricia Spoelder, spent two and a half months living and working in an Amsterdam house. Their purpose was to explore the possibility of creating and displaying art in an everyday environment, or , in other words, to examine the feasibility of inhabiting an (art) project.

The house, at Deurloostraat 35, gradually became a kind of art platform, without however relinquishing all the experiences and connotations associated with domestic life. As the process of creation progressed, the place where they both lived and produced their art was simultaneously transformed into a different kind of habitat, geared to their own desires. This allowed the foursome to specifically explore questions concerning boundaries and boundary situations: the boundary between inhabiting a space and art, between art and life, life and work, work and thought, thought and imagination, imagination and production and so forth. After two and a half months the house was opened to the ‘outside world’. It was Alicia Framis who outline the contours of the Arte Habitable joint project, interaction between the various artists being a prime objective. After some time, however, it became clear that the three artists who had accepted Alicia Framis’s invitation needed to make some kind of personal statement within this joint project. On the principle that ‘the various parts strengthen the whole’, they produced a large number of individual word, alongside and in combination with explicit examples of interaction.




Stop-motion animation, Amsterdam, 2002-2003

Two stop-motion animation movies. Stop-motion animation is used to describe animation created by physically manipulating real-world objects and photographing them one frame of film at a time to create the illusion of movement. The heads, hands and feeds of the puppets are made from wax, with a bodyframe of electric wire and fabric clothing. This stop-motion puppet figures interacting with each other in a constructed environment, in contrast to the real-world interaction in model animation. The puppets are about 30 cm each and are portraits of real people, like musicians and actors used in this animation movies. The first one is based on a true story of the Azart, the Ship of Fools. The second one, the animation film The knee of Ilmatar is based on the Finnish saga The Kalevala.

Electrifying adventures



The knee of Ilmatar - part 1




The knee of Ilmatar - part 2


title - The knee of Ilmatar
directors - Victor Barrientos, Kika Booy, Patricia Spoelder
scenario - Victor Barrientos, Kika Booy, Patricia Spoelder, Robbie Baars
producers - Kika Booy, Patricia Spoelder
production company - Azart animation production
editing - Kika Booy, Victor Barrientos
animation & puppets - Patricia Spoelder
decor - Robbie Baars, Patricia Spoelder
camera - Victor Barrientos, Kika Booy, Patricia Spoelder
sound - Kika Booy
costumes - Irina Gallardo Baez, Robbie Baars
music - 'Trio Sonata' musicians: Ludmila Maximova, Elena Lelchuk Vladimir Sklearenko, Russia
composers - Chris Corstens, Sergei Berinsky, Yuval Mesner
year of premiere - 2005
country of production - Netherlands
category - short film
genre - puppet stop-motion animation
no dialog
color VHS
time - 13,52 minutes
Studiofacilities - Bert Lonsain, Patricia Spoelder
Shipmodel - Maarten Vrolijk
Thanks to - August Dirks, Peter Thissen, Maria Ramos, Gabriel van Hoften, Pete Botman and Eddy Zoutendijk

Next photo's:
The waxpuppets used in the animation films (real size +/- 35 cm)



The waxpuppets used in the animation films (real size +/- 35 cm)