A walk, with artist Jan Rothuizen

 Jacob Wallett

This was intended to be a review of Jan Rothuizen's book The Soft Atlas of Amsterdam: Hand Drawn Perspectives from Daily Life (2014). The book, an English language version of the Dutch original (2009), is a sensitive, playful and detailed account of daily life as encountered in a number of places around the city. The book includes maps of districts, streets, bedrooms, even the air traffic control room at Schiphol airport. Amsterdam's reputation is a unique mixture: Equally famous for tech innovation, legal prostitution and its UNESCO-protected waterways. The picturesque streets that meander in long curves along the edges of canals form a deceptively continuous substratum for wildly diverse activities.

So I looked through the book, a few times, and tried to imagine how to approach the task of writing descriptions of these detailed maps, maps that tell stories about places with disregard for a hard hierarchy of information. Maps that integrate voices, noises, architecture, uncanny feelings and city planning using a fluid and opportunistic mixture of drawing and text. I couldn’t think how to write it without killing the liveliness with words. I sent an email to Jan asking if he would go on a walk with me in Amsterdam, a city I barely knew, and he replied that afternoon, suggesting we meet at an Asian supermarket and walk just to see what we might encounter. I met him outside the small supermarket, Tijns Tokyo, on a really hot day, and after a very brief introduction I turned on my microphone, and we walked. Right from the start he asked me to lead, so being as observant to my surroundings as I could while also interviewing a stranger on a hot day in a new city, I started us on a rather meandering walk.

Jan was curious, friendly, and possibly amused. I could tell it was a struggle for him not to lead along streets he knew so well, and he only half managed it. We spent an hour walking, and ended at his studio. Five days later I revisited Amsterdam, taking the same route from my flat in The Hague to de Pijp metro station, walking to the supermarket where I had met Jan previously, and then trying to re walk the route we had taken on my own, this time with a camera, not a microphone in my hand. This was an interesting exercise; as I navigated the streets the conversation with Jan – its content, undulating tone, even occasional awkwardness – slowly came back to me in fragments as I revisited the places we had been. Although I attempted to rely on static 'postcard' visual memories of the roads and junctions, the remembered fragments of conversation always pushed through, such that as I made my way along the route the second time, the road underfoot became textured, and my experience in time punctuated, by an assemblage of half-remembered, and entirely contingent, sight-sound-word-event associations.

Rather than "I remember this building" I found myself thinking "I remember looking at that building when Jan said that thing about his old school". I used my memories of the conversation to find my way through the streets, and I found the conversation in the streets along the way. The striking thing was that my visual memory of the route, so blindly assumed to be the dominant and most coherent report of place, needed bolstering by those more slippery memories of what was said, and in what way, and on top of what surrounding sounds and chance events. Sometimes I was even remembering back to a memory of Jan's. A recollection of a recollection: "This is where Jan said that when he was little they made beer here." These bridges between the two walks became my most trusted landmarks by which to navigate, more so than road signs and more even than the street-facing bars, restaurants and shops. These memories of sounds and words and serendipitous goings-on were more persuasive and more reliable aids to navigation than purely visual memories of the streets – if purely visual memories are even possible – which although overpoweringly strong in some instances, were in general filtered away as quick as they came.

What follows is an abridged transcript and observational notes from our walking conversation, and a map with photographs and pink pins (e.g Pin 1) to document the route. This is a response to Jan's drawings, as well as an attempt to (softly) document our meeting, which took place in two overlaid walks, one in person and one in memory. The piece is yet to settle, fine, since it's about walking...

JW        So you're following me? 

JR         I'm following you, yeah. I did this for the first time when I had some friends over from – let's cross over – from China, and I was so bored with always going the same route, so I asked them to guide me around.

JW        Do you have a particular strategy for walking? 

JR         Well…not really. It really depends. The last walk I did was in the city of Heerlen, in the south of Holland. You just try to figure out what will be the area that you want to cover. Like in the beginning you want to cover a very large field, but then you think I want to concentrate on the essence of the thing that I'm looking for. Very often when I first go out and it's a large area I take a rental bike, and then afterwards I will go to a specific area. But it's more important to get an understanding of where you are, to figure out the construction of a place. 

JW        You said you were following me, but I can't help feel I'm being led.

JR         Oh really!? Where are we going?

JW        Good question, I think we're going this way now (Pin 3). You said about always wanting to know where you are, when I look at your drawings one of the things that strikes me is that they seem to be relating very local interactions with large-scale layouts or [city] plans. I'm always aware that the serendipitous interactions and moments you capture are being directed by the street layout or a nearby building or structure.

A BMW swerves onto the pavement beside us, Jan says "Oops" and I lose my train of thought.

JR         Um, I'm not sure I really understand the question, but I think there's a lot of editing – you choose the interactions that you feel are a part of the environment you're in, or that explain a little bit about the environment. But it's quite intuitive, why you chose for this or that.

JW        It's funny, this shop is called Brick Lane, this is a very famous street in East London.

JR         Yeah yeah yeah, does it have bricks still?

JW        It does: very uneven, slippery, dark grey cobble stones. And there's a bagel shop on Brick Lane that doesn't have a door, because they never close.

JR         They never close! So they took the door out? Yeah why bother, it's like having insurance when you never travel.

We turn the corner, and suddenly we are surrounded by big brand names and traffic (Pin 4). 

 JW        In an environment like this the idea of doing a drawing is very overwhelming, because I don't know how I would filter the very layered information in the street. There are many ways you could approach that – if you're telling a story, or if you're trying to report the way people use particular infrastructure. Are there ways you make decisions about what to draw and write?

JR         I think very often there is a curiosity that drives you to a place, and then the question is what am I curious about? What is it that attracts me to this place. So I often really start with very basic – shall we go this way? 

JW        Yes, ok.

JR         – try to start from very basic questions about how do I feel about a place, or what do I already know about the place, or what do I want to feel. There is often a lot of knowing already and I think it's interesting to analyse what you feel and what you think [by using] drawing to try to decipher it. So then you look for clues that help you tell the story that is already in you.

JW        I think that's right. When you say 'Map' or 'Atlas' a lot of people will think that must be an     objective project, that the job would be to be as objective as possible, but your drawings are all very personal. They all make me picture you – or sometimes me as you – in the scene, because they are interactions rather than hard observations (Pin 5).

JR         Yeah [Jonathan] Raban – I really like him, and also Yi-Fu Tuan. They both say the same thing, they both say why don't we concentrate on the things we don't know, because these things also matter. So it's about realism in a strange way. We tend to think of realism as about facts, but when you only have facts it isn't very realistic because the world isn't made of facts only. 

For a while we walk in silence through the noisy market. Hot with food smells.

JR        In that sense perhaps a really proper map is like a religion that you can hold onto – you know? To say this is what's here and I can hold onto it and I can capture it and I can point to it and I can touch it (Pin 6). 

At this point we stop while Jan looks for an app on his phone that he wants to show me. We stand still for the first time and I suddenly notice many details about where we are. As I look around a woman in front of us drops her keys. We walk again and I feel more relaxed.

JR         So you are aware that we walked in a circle? (Pin 7).

JW        In a circle, yes. I couldn't walk past the giant golden croissant. There was a giant golden croissant on one of the buildings, I had to see that.

JR         Oh yeah? That's new actually.

JW        Which direction do you live in?

JR         I live in the east (he points) and my studio is in the centre (he turns his face to indicate).

JW        And have you been in this area for many years?

JR         For many years. I was very close to here in art school – De Ateliers – that's when I was still trying to be a painter, and when I wanted to clear my head I always had a walk on the market here. 

JW        Clear your head of painting?

JR         Yes *he laughs*. Clear my head of being in the studio and trying to make something sublime. Which is sort of awkward, felt like a practice that…it felt very…how do you say it in English… I was trying too hard.

 A groups of Greek men walk past - "Malakas!" 

JW        I know you spent some years in New York. I only visited once, but I was surprised by how much I loved it and surprised by how beautiful I found it. I thought it would be kind of impressive but grim, but I thought it was actually a very beautiful city.

JR         It is beautiful.

JW        Coming from London where the city is structured on medieval roads, to New York which is this impressive grid system of wide avenues…and then being in Amsterdam today and it's all structured around seventeenth century canals and circles...

JR         Yeah its funny, the grid of New York, you could explain it as a very loveless execution, but then it's very surprising: so often you can see the water; you can look through; you can look through the avenues. It's really effective.

There are people speaking Spanish around us. 'Somebody to Love' by Queen is playing from somewhere.

JW        This is a long market

JR         It is, this used to be a canal, it used to be water, and on the sides there used to be mills that were sawing the wood. You can tell a little bit still.

He turns around and points at the cobbled floor as if to say – "see how it used to be water."

JR         This was all built nineteenth century. Real quick, real cheap (Pin 8).

JW        So this area is De Pijp?

JR         De Pijp, yeah. 'The Pipe'. They're not really sure why it's called The Pipe. A pijpenla is a very small and narrow thing from a cabinet or something... They actually planned to break it down, but they didn't.

JW        And this was built as social housing?

JR         I think so, yeah. It was like labourer housing. I wonder if it's social housing in that it was government or municipality owned? It's something different…

JW        Dwellings?

JR         Yeah. You see this house, 1892. Neglected. I have my bicycle still at the sandwich shop, if we pick it up and walk to my studio? But we don't have to walk back this way.

JW        Oh, I forgot I was in charge.

JR         It's difficult for me, you notice, I'm already pushing you.

JW        I can see. You say you don’t have strategies for walking but I think you probably do.

JR         But that's a difficult thing, especially in your own city.

JW        Sure. Well how about strategies for walking in other cities then?

JR         Well first the structure – the structure of the street plan – but there is also some knowledge about where certain things are probably located…

Jan’s practice of, in his own words, “sharing location-based stories” is as much research and reportage as clairvoyance. He uses information about a place to find the story he is going to tell, and then the story determines the drawing. Over and through and coincident with the drawn scene are his observations and feelings in words. Teetering between pathetic fallacy and the dispassion of a police report, it’s the words that really carry you into the work.

JR         ...But then Chinese cities are totally different again.

He says gleefully. 

JW        There's one thing I haven't asked you. That is, the difference between the text and the drawings in your mind. 

JR         The correlation between them?

JW        The correlation and the clash.

JR         Yeah because you asked me is it a frustration? But I never think of it as a frustration, but as a benefit. I discovered that I can write the things I cannot draw, and draw the things I cannot write. And when it works really well, with a few elements you can really ignite things...by just adding one word...because you have the drawing of the setting, there's a lot of things you don't have to describe. I like it to be equal.

JW        It does something to the drawing, that the drawing can be non-linear, but still be read. We're very used to reading being linear.

JR         I know when I draw for the newspaper people start at the top left hand corner, so people need some sort of introduction, but then people can just go.

We stop at a junction and I look lost. He laughs and waits for me to decide which way leads to his bicycle.       

JW        I think it's this way? Yes, this way! One thing that I was really interested to hear about is how you approach the drawings you do on such incredibly different scales and [to be seen in] in different settings. Looking through the Soft Atlas of Amsterdam I can imagine certain ways to use that book – to walk around holding it; or go to a place and compare it – but then you do these enormous wall drawings like in the Stedelijk Museumlab, which will be experienced in a totally different way, but are formally very similar.

JR         Yeah what is quite exciting about using them in large scale installations is that they become much more like a talking piece. In a book it's private, or armchair travelling. And I noticed in exhibitions once you have them up really big on the wall people discuss them with each other so there's much more interaction. I didn't expect that but you would notice people standing in front of it pointing out things.

JW        Aside from the context of it being in a museum, just the scale alone changes the way people experience them. And that people stand and look and can walk while they look.

JR         I'm doing a project now in Columbia where I put really big drawings and we paste them on paper throughout the neighbourhood and that's also really nice, like publishing in a newspaper, to bring your drawings to people that don't think of looking at your drawings. They can stumble upon it.

JW        Yes, stumbling is probably a key word. Which is your bike?

JR         It's over here (Pin 10).

Jan has provided monthly drawings for de Volkskrant newspaper since 2010. They send him to places, within the Netherlands and around the world, to make map drawings for stories. Translating from the paper's website yields a brilliantly terse description:  "Draftsman Jan Rothuizen visits places for De Volkskrant where social dynamics are visible. His works not only show what is there, but also how people deal with it and experience it.

JW        You've had that gig for a long time, do you enjoy doing it?

JR         Very much so. It's outside of everything and it has a huge visibility. I get to go to places I'd never visit, never hear about. 

The idea of a newspaper being 'outside of everything' is curious; I ask if he considers himself a reporter.

JR        No, I still call myself an artist, although I show my work outside the context of contemporary art. I'm curious about the world I live in, and want to be part of this world as an artist.

We're now standing exactly where we first met, and I go back into the Asian supermarket where I bought the can of coke and put the now empty can in the bin while Jan gets his bike. Then we start making our way towards the centre.

 We walk along past busy cafes. To the left I can smell fish coming from the snack bar selling raw herring. Headless and split to remove the spine, to be eaten in a single gulp, eyes to the sky like a gull.

JW        So a lot of the questions I prepared sort of presume things like 'strategy' and 'decision', and I notice your hesitation to engage with those concepts.

JR         Yeah it's not very strict.

JW        It's not the way you work then?

JR         We also talked earlier about creating art in a studio, so you create a space which is confined and separated from the outside world, and this also means you're in total charge of the story that's happening there. And what I find interesting about having walks and doing things in public space is that you're not in charge of the story. People come up to you, people talk to you. So there's a lot of interaction that you cannot plan. 

JW        And yet you must be balancing that, because you're working with terms like 'Atlas' which can be very bound up with layers of meaning and expertise.

JR         But once you use the word soft! This is changing always, as an artist I think you are always trying to find some sort of key to translate what you see in a very direct way. For me with the drawings I've found a language I think. But I'm always trying to renew the language and to question it, before it becomes like a mannerism.

JW        Your maps often first appear to use a consistent 'realistic' scale, but on closer inspection, scale, sizes and relative distances are not so uniform. How does playing with scale let you map a place as you really find it?

JR         Scale is very subjective. In my drawings I play loosely with scale, I can shorten streets or just leave things out because they have no function in what I want to show and tell. The wonderful thing with drawing is that you can easily show things in a way that seems realistic but is not.

We walk past building works and circular saws buzz through an open doorway to the right. To the left there is a gated carpark comically full of security guards, chatting as one group comes on shift and another finishes (Pin 11).

JW        So where are we now?

JR         We're walking by the Stadhouderskade, we're next to the Heineken experience. Which used to be the brewery. And when I was little they were still making beer here (Pin 12).

JW        Did it smell?

JR         Yeah totally! This bitter – you know the smell? It's an obnoxious scent. I think it's the Hops that they use. Ok we can cross here. This is the border between the old and the new city. And the art school I was at is in the big building over there. It's called De Ateliers and it was really a place where you were trained to do art for museums. My studio looked like a museum hall. Now we're walking toward the old city. This is like the Golden age of Amsterdam, when they build the Rijksmuseum and there used to be a really big glass palace there.

We stand opposite Café Mulder and wait for a tram to pass.

JW        There is a very interesting and amusing and noticeable difference between the way Dutch people and British people cross the road.

JR         What's that?

JW        Dutch people look at the light, and British people look at the car.

JR         Interesting! 

 We walk over two bridges, past a tower of meringues, a smashed window, a tattoo shop (Pin 13).

JR         This is one of my favourite streets. It goes right through the old canals (Pin 14).

 We turn right and suddenly it's quiet and cool.

JR         My studio is over there, where that white car is. This is one of the few streets that goes in between the canals. 

A woman cycles past and waves at Jan - "Hey!"

JR         It would be nice if you could also record all the mental notes you take - like a second line of observations.

JW        I have quite a long time before I need to get the train, so I will sit and write.

He locks his bike. A man looks down from a balcony above the door to the building we are about to enter. The entire ground floor façade is covered with dripping wet creepers. Someone must have just watered them with a hose. There's that smell of water on hot brick. We walk through the door into the reverberating quiet of the concrete stairwell. After the sustained heat and impulses of the streets everything is still. As we walk up the first flight of stairs I say "I love that smell," already passed.

JR         The rain smell!

His atelier is actually a studio apartment where he used to live, before he had two children. Back from the room he works in is a bedroom (where friends stay when they visit) and at the front overlooking the street is a kitchen. I had anticipated a great vantage over city streets, like those bird's eye views in his drawings, but from the work room window Amsterdam was a glimpse, up-close and cropped by the overgrown creepers that grew over half of the window. The goings on past this street to the south from where we had walked were entirely blocked by the row of gabled buildings that rose like a reflection on the south side of the narrow street (Pin 15).

JR         You want some coffee?

On one side of the room a long worktop is covered in dip pens, black ink, and pencils, neat and accessible. On the opposite wall are drawings from an ongoing project in Columbia, to be a synthesis of text and moving image, alongside cropped images from Google maps that he uses as a basis for layouts. 

JR         The project in Columbia is related to gaining identity for people that have been neglected for fifty years through conflict. I did a big show there that was very successful because I felt that they saw themselves portrayed in a way they could relate to. That was helping them build a new image. There's all the hardship and all the troubles, but there's a new economy with an emerging middle class. It's a very exciting place to be.

In Jan's first book 'On A Clear Day You Can See Forever', which he gave me as a gift during this meeting, he tells a story about meeting two Italian men who struggle to help him find his way because they can't read the map he presents them with. Not everyone has the tools to read a map, but cooperative mapmaking can help to create a compromising language, to help people to tell their story and help others to hear it. Although he was not familiar with the term 'counter-mapping', many of his projects find a way to allow us into the environments of marginalized people – refugee camps, women's shelters, streets where homeless people sleep, clinics for heroin addicts. In many ways his drawings are particular, recognizable, and even stylized, yet his willingness to put himself in the picture has resulted in an adaptive practice, enabling him to co-create stories that let ignored or silenced voices through. Jan created the award-winning interactive documentary 'Refugee Republic' in 2014 alongside multimedia journalist Martijn van Tol and photographer Dirk Jan Visser. The project is an ambitious multimedia documentation of Domiz Camp, a Syrian refugee camp in northern Iraq, combining drawings, film, photography, sound and text. Partly produced by De Volkskrant, the Dutch version was released on their website alongside a six page special. In addressing the refugee camp as an emerging city with significant cultural and economic identity, while also documenting the unbearable uncertainty faced by the people who live there, the project manages to convey something of a terrible paradox: that our current efforts to deal with the refugee crisis build displacement and temporariness into the solution.

His original drawings are stored in a case in the bedroom. 

JR         We can take a look.

He takes out a drawing and lays it on top of the unmade bed. It is a map of The Hembrug area, Zaandam, on the North Sea Canal that connects Amsterdam to the North Sea. 

JR         This was a commission from the museum there, to make a drawing of this area, it's huge. An old munitions factory.

Looking at an original drawing for the first time I notice pencil marks under the black ink. Even after many iterations, he was still adding details in, right up to the final version. This sort of making-thinking, which artists do so much of, can be difficult to unearth and scrutinize on a first meeting, before you find a compromising language, and so often becomes relegated (or elevated, depending on your view) to the secret dictates of instinct. 

JR         This is where they made bullets and also tested them, he points with his finger to the map. I was here also a few years ago and it was a place [set up] for refugees. Which was also bizarre – this hall where they kept munitions and sold it to the Middle East and now the victims of these wars, of this industry, are sheltering there.

 His voice sounds impassioned, and I worry that I've been asking the wrong questions.

JW        That doesn’t sound bizarre at all, that sounds like the world.

JR         Yeah it is the world, but that's what I always find. When you dig into a place the contradictions are always there. In a way, the world is always there.

JW        Is that the realism you were talking about before?

JR         Yes, the realism of place. And the impact of globalism, how it affects people on different levels.

JW        I think that's what I was trying to get at with my earlier question, about how the most local interactions in a city are still structured based on bigger plans - which might be historical and geographical like the canal system in Amsterdam, or political and economic as here. That these plans are always with us, determining our route.

JR         Yeah and the kind of people you meet – the descendants of the slaves we brought to Suriname - I have to make the coffee.

I look at the map again. The large drawing lies unevenly on the super-local geography of the artist's bed, which lends to the drawing some of its features, so that the landscape of the Hembrug, which in reality is flat and lies at sea level, is here represented in proud mounds and hillocks as the paper maps itself over the duvet underneath. I think about the endless negotiation of maps: the place in the object and the object in the place.

Jan is good company, friendly, funny and makes me feel at ease. His attention has been given so generously that when he very briefly takes a phone call at this point it's the first time I'm even aware that I could be encroaching on his schedule. For the remaining time we chat about whatever, then I go back down the cool staircase, into the narrow street between the canals, trams, past the meringues, fish smell. metro. home.

Jan is currently in the early stages of a project in Manchester for the Sick Festival. The project is part of Mindscapes, a program run by Sick Festival of co-operation and co-production between cultural institutions in The Netherlands and Manchester. Jan's project will look at the influence of the environment on mental health in five Manchester neighbourhoods. The resulting drawings will be displayed in public spaces around the city in spring 2021.  www.sickfestival.com/commissions/mindscapes

www.janrothuizen.nl

Nieuw Amsterdam Publishers
Marije Braat
+31205706139
mbraat@nieuwamsterdam.nl

Author

Jacob Wallett (b 1994) is an artist and researcher fascinated by the Natural Sciences. After completing a Master’s degree in Chemistry at UCL he worked briefly in building and construction before moving to The Netherlands where he is currently studying at the Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten (Royal Academy of Art). He works with video, installation, sculpture and text, and finds inspiration in the chemistry lab.