We are in the office of Jeroen Chabot, director of the Willem de Kooning Academy, in the building on the Blaak. Before we start the interview, Jeroen gets up to close the windows to shut out the noise of the passing traffic.
We have our conversation following the news that SKAR will rent out studios to alumni of the Willem de Kooning Academy in a school building on the Putsebocht in Rotterdam Zuid. In that building space will also be reserved for teachers of the Academy to supervise the recently graduated artists. Two aspects that have attracted my interest are first of all the desire that the artists enter into a relationship with the neighbourhood and secondly that, in addition to SKAR and the WdK Academy, Marco Pastors' National Programme Rotterdam South (NPRZ) is also involved.
How does Jeroen Chabot see the cooperation with these two parties? And what is expected of the artists?
"It's very simple. Olof van de Wal came to me with the wish to provide a building for graduates with a role for the neighbourhood. The latter, that element of your active relationship with your immediate surroundings, is important to us and we are happy to hook into that.
That need of us as an academy to be relevant, to share our education with the world in which you manifest yourself, is expressed here in the collaboration with SKAR in such a breeding ground-like situation. We give these graduates the opportunity to set up and scale up a professional company with the guidance of the academy. After three to five years they will have to leave to make room for new recent graduates, that is the intention.
For Marco Pastors, work is the engine of development in the South. And if you want to have a job, you have to be educated. But the drop-out rate, especially of students with a non-Western background in MBO, and certainly in HBO, is gigantic. Without at least MBO, you hardly have access to the labour market. And the gap between the people who can actually take advantage of the opportunities available and the group who cannot is widening all the time. Education has an important role to play in this, and I think we are generally missing out on a lot of opportunities. To that extent, Marco Pastors allows us to pass through a door very well.
We do a lot wrong in our own educational practice; this academy is a predominantly white school, with students coming from backgrounds where often the parents also received higher education.
I think we have a big responsibility to those people in this city who don't have access to art. I also think we have to provide a place for those creative young people that we don't reach now, that we don't see. This is because we are hardly accessible to a large group of young people, we translate everything into a jargon that immediately puts these people at a disadvantage. We ask for a preliminary education and we ask for a portfolio with I don't know how many drawings and work examples. They don't have those.
By being present in that neighbourhood and showing that you can do something with, for example, film or spoken word and performances, art forms that are very close to each other, we will probably be able to reach precisely those young people who are currently out of the loop.
The guidance on the Putsebocht for the alumni themselves is mainly about the way you set up a professional practice and about what you can do from the studio there, for the neighbourhood. The first thing you have to do is get in touch with the people. And talk to them: what do you want, what do you expect from us? I don't know what's going to happen there, what forms of collaboration will take place, but I expect exciting and inspiring solutions to problems that people from that neighbourhood come up with.
We have outlined this plan to three generations of students who have graduated in the last five years. We don't know how many people are interested, but think it's a great opportunity to have a nice workspace faster.
The artists individually enter into a rental contract there and then start their own business. We do need to generate enough mass from which to select. From the interested parties we have to make as strong an occupation as possible. It will not be easy to find enough candidates, because renting such a studio costs money of course, renting is more expensive than squatting.
Our art education here at the WdK is based on three main subjects:
Autonomous, Commercial and Social Practices.
We are looking at a mix of all three Practices, so that the alumni there at the Putsebocht show the full range of possibilities in art. And, not unimportantly, that you can also make good money in art. It is a profession that has status and of which you can be proud.
What our students have in common, whatever Practice they have done, is commitment to society and the need to be relevant. And that's what they're going to show there.
By doing this in the South, in that place, we can express the same relevance that is so highly valued in our curriculum in the activities developed from that studio building. In that sense we want to have a place in it.