Interview with Ilke Gers

For the exhibition Out of Office (Still Here) Quiller MacQuarrie conducted interviews with various artists. This interview is with Ilke Gers, the creator of the floor painting Generator. Ilke Gers creates large-scale floor drawings using chalk and paint machines, letting the body, movement, and the specifics of a location guide her compositions. For Nest, she has made a new work that serves as a starting point, inviting visitors to enter, move through, and add their own markings to the piece.

Quiller:

How do you see your work connects to the themes of the exhibition: access to free time and leisure in relation to the summer vacation?

Ilke:

This work develops previous work referencing children’s street games made in public spaces. These are based on the history of improvised and made up games, particularly by children in urban neighbourhoods without designated parks, who are therefore forced to play in the street—implicating the role of city planning and gentrification. Kids’ chalk markings made on sidewalks and roads inherently respond to their environment, with existing road markings and materials forming the backdrop or structure for game markings and drawings. During the Dutch summer months, when we spend more time outside in the warmer weather, and school holidays mean that children have more time for unstructured play, we see these chalk markings proliferate in public spaces, worn by traffic and washed away by rain, and appearing again in new forms.

With this work I want to initiate this idea of free and purposeless drawing, moving, marking and playing that starts outside Nest, and bleeds into the building, by suggesting the ground surface as a canvas for visitors to make their own chalk drawings. Because chalk is temporary, mistakes don’t matter, and it is possible to enter a space of freedom, something that I think gets lost in our over structured environment. We often associate the idea of being active without a determined outcome with leisure and vacation, and therefore summer months, but of course this is not accessible for people who have to keep working, and has maybe also become harder to access in a time when our attention is plugged into an economy that has us addicted to screens.

Quiller:

How did you connect the building of the DCR, and specifically at Nest to your work. Why did you choose to connect it to the energy factory and what did you find when researching it?

Ilke:

My work is always specific to the context or situation in which it is made, in a way testing the possibilities for movement, language and perception within particular conditions. When I found out that the building used to be part of the Den Haag Power station, I became interested in its former function as a canteen for its workers. There’s a kind of circularity in this having been the space that fuelled the workers tasked with energising the city.

When I started exploring ground markings in 2016 I was interested in a similar relationship between the movements required of workers to make road markings, which in turn determines how we move in public space. I was particularly interested in screed marking, used predominantly in the UK, where workers hand-draw signals, text and images through a kind of choreography, which in turn determines the flow and circulation of traffic. There seemed to be an agency in the way these workers make markings in individuated, yet precise ways, in contrast to the Netherlands where it is more common to use uniform stencils, a process closer to production line work. This more regulated process is not surprising, considering that the smooth circulation of traffic is instrumental in prioritising economic flows, which rests on efficiency, often achieved through standardisation of movements, markings and signals. Through making ground drawings over the last years, I’ve been exploring ways in which this connection of the body, movement and language could resist or destabalise the capitalist imperative of standardisation and efficiency. This includes ways of making markings that are closer to a self developed screed marking, allowing for friction, irregularity, improvisation and change over time.

I see this work at Nest, titled Generator, as a starting point that can hopefully be generative for visitors to explore these kind of active ways of making; irregular, improvised, intuitive and free—in the usually controlled exhibition space. By providing chalk sticks and an open invitation to make markings of their own, it becomes an experiment which echoes the former use of the building as both a source and producer of energy.