BIJLMER DIARY, by Maria Bojan Rus, 2009

“To understand what is going on, what the Bijmermeer means to its inhabitants, to Amsterdam and to the Netherlands in general, one has to evoke the past, follow the biography of this very special district and assess its present shape to get some inkling about what its future may be”, Prof. D. H. Frieling, 2004

Bijlmer Diary takes the archive as a source of inspiration and a medium of expression.
Based on documents from the city’s newspapers archive that preserve the memory of both the crucial and most irrelevant moments in the Bijlmer, this project aims to explore the complex relations between the past and the present within this controversial area of urban experiments.

For Sanja Medic, it is not only the relation between architecture and society that is of interest, but especially the memory of the place, its repression and return in the present. In fact, this installation expands beyond the very local context in order to address universal themes of individual and collective subjectivity while at the same time creating a new framework within which one can think about who we are and how we live.

Questioning the very notion of the document, Sanja Medic critically investigates how Bijlmer’s most crucial events and the problems of the community are presented within the larger context of the Dutch press. The fact that this newspapers archive is rather a collection of negative stories, gives the artist the boost to take an in depth examination of what in her vision is relevant and specific for this community.

The artist’s approach might best be described as an attempt to reconstruct piece by piece the complicated puzzle that composes the today’s image of the Bijlmer. She assumes in fact the role of a new archeologist that continuously excavates in search for meanings within the present’s ontology.

The entire display from the container should be read as one installation. In addition to the Stadsdeel archive’s copy that is displayed chronologically and which contains the complete newspaper ”diary” archive, Medic also exhibits 3 other works that represent her reaction after filtering these Bijlmer stories.

The first group of images is literally ”framing” her personal experiences while “digging” through this archive; the second group of paper objects relies on architectural imagery and represents the artist’s comment on the dialectical relations between the built space and the Bijlmer’s inhabitants. Finally a large scale collage completes the installation. It is an image of a star ship – that generously hosts the whole Bijlmer community. The image refers to the ship from the science fiction film series “Battle Star Galactica”, whose task has been to lead a small fugitive fleet of survivors into space in search of a fabled refugee known as Earth. This collage combines the film imagery with pictures of the Bijlmer inhabitants taken from the city’s archive. In front of this impressive picture, the artist places a life size image of Jaap Smith, a beloved policeman who became well known for his major role in keeping the harmony within this community.

In an original manner this association of so many different elements tells us the story of the Bijlmer’s transformation and resurrection, from a socially engineered society in the past to the real community of now. Bijlmer Diary is thus more than an artistic project; it is a tool that allows us for understanding how through the energy and positive will of the people this neighborhood has been regenerated and has gained back the confidence to the future.