The routes my body has travelled in the city of Amsterdam, where I have lived since 1982, are interwoven with my palace of memories, which has filled itself with all the traversed surfaces in this city. My footprints zigzag through these streets; they hold my story within it, just as I carry the city within me. Miscellaneous infatuations, heart-breaks, existential (and drunken) meanderings are all ingrained in the chronology of the bricks and stones. I feel at home here, also because of the small-town character of the place. I remember bumping into someone with a familiar face on the street after my first year — a first sign of connection, grounding.

Now, a few decades later, many ‘familiar’ faces have arrived and many have disappeared as well. Perhaps they didn’t disappear altogether, or even leave the city, but they have certainly left my daily reach, the routes I take, and the terrains I cover. No doubt they chose different moments of passing, of traversing the city, through a different street, taking a different means of transportation, making their appearances, and disappearances at a different time in the street view. While moving through the city, minor adaptations of personal itineraries become a part of spatial and temporal self-portraits.

Viewed this way, it is as if I am starting over and over again. Whether there are new or old faces, the city remains the city. Even if it is repaired and/or multiplied almost daily in different locations, the streets will remain where they are as historically ingrained traces. At most, a few new roads will be added on plots of land vacated after erasing or renovating a former factory or on rediscovered, previously forgotten wastelands. New habitable surfaces emerge, breathing new life into a neighbourhood, with new passers-by populating the streets — newly gentrified.

How can I identify this feeling of belonging, being in the right place and feeling at home? Viewing the notion of destination in light of the extended fabric or canvas of the city, my own residence stands in relation to the city’s need for residents, after all, what is the city without residents? It is an empty field of structures, like trees in a forest, and adjacent space to move through.

If I see the streets during lockdown, I see mostly empty streets, where all the people are holed up in their homes, withdrawn into their private domains, leaving a lot of public space suddenly vacant. The empty city is like an architect’s model, ready to be authorised. I view belonging somewhere as an existential desire, in which man’s body longs for a place to physically belong — a place for the body to rest, to reside. In my wandering through the city, which slowly revealed itself as an existential (physical) research, a method emerged in order to expose the use of the various surfaces in the city.

As part of this method for research, I also consider my daily walk, a walk around the block with my dog, as a starting point to identify, visualise, and imagine the ground I live on. In doing so, I realise that it is geography putting me on the map. It keeps me on the map. I observe the surface of my daily route, the sound, the light, the small bursts of nature on the paved terrain of the city, the locals I meet or pass each day, the birds, the clouds, the passers-by, the way I walk, and my own rhythm. Together they constitute my relationship, which I have seemingly taken for granted, with the many elements of this city which I have cherished for decades.

In light of my research, I also scan the performativity of my own neighbourhood. I am especially concerned with this concept of what is public, communal, and private space — this boundary runs through my personal biotope. I look at the metamorphosis of my own neighbourhood, once a remote and desolate harbour area that has slowly turned into an ‘A-location’ and is listed as such in the guides of architecture students. It is a neighbourhood mentioned as a point of interest for tourists to visit. I see my own role in this, changing as it has from a squatting student through a tolerant ship occupant to a legitimate berth owner. Gentrification is determined by circumstance.

Another beginning

To write is to pursue a train of thought, to be astir, like a steady movement across these pages, similar to how my body moves across the pages of the city. It is also a way of editing and rewriting the movements that my body and those of my passers-by jot down on this urban fabric or canvas. What does public space as a space of movement mean for these bodies to move through? Sometimes this space is in buildings open to the public, a part of the public domain. My research is an investigation into the performativity of the body: what is the practice of our way of moving around, day in and day out, with the body as an indispensable and vital tool. Whether it be tangible, visible, or audible, it is not only about the way of performing this kinetic progression, but also the way we perceive, if we perceive at all, this movement while immersed in our own daily routine. Reflecting on my findings has provided me with an insight into the value and necessity of an open void in public space for movement. Thus, I see the crowd on the street more as a stain that moves across the map, which in the absence of choreographic instructions, becomes a drifting crowd that rides the wave of a somatic-nomadic-like memory. Could this be a lore of us humans, connected to our ancestors’ wanderlust, instinctively at the mercy of an unknown thrust to remain adrift?