REALTYCOOP2017

The film was able to illustrate the meaning of the housing problem through juxtaposing different visual realities of space. The crowded hostels, narrow corridors, claustrophobic cinematic frames, crowded objects with no enough space to contain them were the visual elements of the Surinamese housing condition. While on the other hand, interviewing officials, we see one person facing the camera in spacious offices where all the stuff find drawers to hide. The clothes hanging on the balconies or inside the rooms telling us that space doesn't have the capacity to hold them any longer is almost a common feature of the poor neighborhood. The structure of the film allowed the flow of information, starting from a writing disclaimer about the government policies, then slowly revealing the exploitation that can find roots in these policies all the way to end on the kind of social life that surrounds a future generation of young Surinamese growing under these conditions. In a movi...

The camera portraits the two kinds of characters inside their surroundings, including the various and articulated patterns of the floors, walls, curtains, furniture (like fake marble) of the immigrants’ house interiors; and white, cold light, stacks of paper, wallets, are used to portrait the Dutch offices. The “exploiter” is also portrayed on a boat, while the immigrant kid is portrayed laying against a wall on the street.   There are long pauses on the kid’s faces and the kids interrupt themselves while being interviewed, not knowing what to tell next or not knowing what to do next to change their current situation.   The head of the “eviction department” looks a tiny man compared to the huge Amsterdam city map behind him and the scene fades away while he's explaining the problems and impossibilities of the immigrants-shelter situation.   Amsterdam is filmed from the water of a canal, where ancient and long-lasting walls emerge from the water.  

the black rooms, cramped up, moist paint, holes and mould open plumbing, open electricity the bright administrative spaces of maps and shirts and documents encounters in encountering numbers – guess who? boats, cruising among boats Sundays the common space in pensions beer, shacking hands, uncontrolled expression of white segregation along race; and; but; also; along mental states the kids among watching the flipper ball bouncing off and around dreaming of flipping the ball bouncing off and below themselves for a change these kids walking on the street, then proud and confident, chin up. shopping, public domain – “we are, finally, nevertheless, here” - see I final song and factuality of the situation absurd finds its relief in grotesque festivity demons, clowns and trans dressing up and the liquor deep into the night all too white among all of it the alienated body of colour

‘Seep’ There is leakage, seepage, spills, spots, mold, moist, flooding and stains of where water has bled into the buildings which poses as shelters for migrants in Amsterdam, 1970-early 80ies. The ‘pensions’ are fire hazards, not fit for living, yet it is seepage that defines the walls, floors and ceilings. The owners and managers of the properties sail on this water, steering by the wheel on a boat, with water skiers in the background spending leisurely hours at the water.  The flows of funds from the city of Amsterdam and the state of the Netherlands meant to support the migrants gets redirected to the accounts of pension owners, capable of reading and steering through social services.  9 years down the line, the administrators of the city of Amsterdam sips on a glass of water and shrugs.

Ondernaming Onderdak is a 1982 documentary, produced by Andre Reeder as a final work of the Film Academy in Amsterdam, which features interviews of Surinamese and Antillean immigrants in Amsterdam, following a decade long immigration wave from the former Dutch colonies, as well as city and state officials in different positions within and around the welfare system, who do or should be providing for the dignity of their living. The documentary focuses especially on depicting the figure of the “shelter entrepreneur” who, exploiting what seems to be an organisational and/or conceptual flaw of the receptive system (subject to the conditions of the commercial housing market), profits from the welfare benefits assigned to the immigrants, gaining even the position of direct administrator of their finances. Stylistically, the documentary showcases the attempt to depict the situation in the most objective way, interviewing the protagonists in their usual environment (houses, offices, ho...

On the dock, the black Labrador looks at his master leaving on his boat for a relaxing afternoon with his family and friends. He is surfing on the river while the pension is infiltrated with water. The ceiling is melting, walls are molding, pipes are vomiting from time to time the water of the kitchen sink.  The administrators talk about this precarious situation of pension from open space office where their desks have almost the side of a bed and computers are constantly printing bills.  Liquid is everywhere in the city, it's only a matter of control technology. Fuck this carnaval, I would secretly say! 

Onderneming Onderdak ( Company Lodging ) (1983) directed by Andre Reeder examines the abhorrent living conditions and treatment of Surinamese migrants to Amsterdam following the independence of the former Dutch Antilles in 1973. The film was first publicly screened in 2010 after it was withdrawn from a public screening by the Dutch Broadcasting Company in the early 1980s. Focusing on the role of the city of Amsterdam alongside private housing speculators and businessmen, the documentary film traces the lives of occupants by way of interviews with tenants, landlords and city officials. The systematic exploitation of precarious communities by banal bureaucracy and strategic business interests reduces the basic human need for shelter to financial enterprise. The film compellingly unfolds and highlights the racialisation of public and private space in the Netherlands under conditions of neoliberal governance.

Mepschen begins by citing Susanne Wessendorf and her account of the super diverse district of Hackney. However, he argues for a different result or set of conditions in the district of the New West in Amsterdam. Specifically, he calls the processes by which super diversity comes to be understood in the New West as the ‘culturalisation of everyday life’. Mepschen argues for ‘a dialectic of flow and closure’, conditions of increasing heterogeneity and simultaneous fixity. For Mepschen, Dutch culturalism controls and fixes identity by highlighting the physical and somatic proximity and alterity of others. This institutes an autochtony that establishes a dichotomy of guest and stranger, us and them. Mepschen also argues that a lack of discourse, a purely visual operation wherein people are ‘indifferent to difference’, prevents discussion, ‘an increasing physical awareness of the cultural corporeal alterity of others. In the Netherlands there is a clear boundary between autochthonous (loca...

WHITE ORDER: Racialization of Public Space in the Netherlands. Dealing with state apparatus, administration, execution. The language of the argumentation by the State in different fields. Anti-Blackness And Disavowed Spatial Violence On The Outsider/Intruder p6: a bureaucratic apparatus that regulates the processes of exclusion and “the extent to which these are presented as acceptable or even legitimate.” Racism and bureaucracy, as Hannah Arendt notes, are intimately connected. Allochtoon , a common term in Dutch social management, political discourse and colloquial language, is used to categorize a person born abroad, or a “person of whom at least one parent was born abroad. […] a “characteristic showing with which country someone actually is closely related given their own country of birth and that of their parents.” p7: Both Allochtoon and Autochtoon suggest a fusion of body, soil, water, air, and sun , and this amalgam gives rise to a geomorphic body. […] only...