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Mini Eiffel Towers Dredged from the Bottoms of Rotterdam Canals: Spring Research Excursion to Paris Lili Huston-Herterich

In April 2018, the Master Fine Art cohort of the Piet Zwart Institute travelled to Paris alongside artist Liesbeth Bik and theorist Jan Verwoert. The trip ran parallel to two seminars: Bik’s “Exhibitioning as a Verb” and Verwoert’s “The Discovery of Life.” We arrived with the flavour of Paris’ early-twentieth-century bohemian culture in our mouths from servings of Henri Bergson, Djuna Barnes, Simone Weil, and other writers’ works which we had read together with Verwoert in the fall, complimented by a distinct note of spatial awareness from the “exhibitioning” seminar with Bik in previous months.

Beginning our days with bad hostel croissants and exhibition excursions, and ending them under mood lighting in warm rooms, these initiating flavours were muddied by the reality of travelling, and being, together. Liesbeth directed students to create new choreographies with a map or tour that traced our activities as an approach to story-making (and in turn, exhibitioning). Jan encouraged us to make marks in a different kind of way—by turning to each other to draw one another’s portraits as we spent this time together. These prompts did not generate a clear logbook of our activities, timeline, and analysis of what we saw—instead, what was recorded were impressions made under the circumstances of a moving train, or a darkened room, or with empty bellies, or after expensive pastries.

Did we perform the bohemian—the lifestyle of a collective experimentation with life—and did we find spaces that adapted to it? Collected here are the impressions that lasted after these four days travelling as a group, and then separately, and then together again through museums, galleries, parks, bars, restaurants, department stores, hostel lobbies, bakeries, train stations, markets, and cafes in the city. Mostly, in places that allowed us to loiter: spaces we were invited to treat as public, and occupy together.