admin

With Stillness in Concert, I return to the source of my childhood in the Bijlmer. As a child, I spent hours in my room listening to the music of Scarlatti, Mozart, Baden Powell, and Bach. I found it enchanting and alienating, this music from another universe. It would rise from the subtle grooves of a spinning record like steam escaping from the cracks of a volcano. It was a world into which I suddenly tumbled, with the album cover image serving as a postcard from a distant land. The image and the music together formed exciting, melancholic, or romantic stories, depending on how I felt.

When I looked out the window and saw the treetops silhouetted against the gray concrete apartment buildings, or when it was dark and the car lights on the ring road moved, these two worlds came together and amplified each other in their strangeness. Sometimes, my chest felt too small for the overwhelming emotions that engulfed me.

Even when I rode my bike to school or music lessons during the day, fragments of the music echoed in my head, transforming the image of the apartment buildings, with their balconies and galleries, into Don Quixote’s windmills. The symmetrical infrastructure, designed not to get lost, turned into an exciting route, with the straight canals and concrete bridges becoming adventurous mordents.

My bike tires hummed melodiously on the asphalt, accompanied by the subtle taps of the gravel on the path, like hair on a bald head. The snippets of kaseko music from the speakers of an apartment, the drone of low-flying air traffic, the singing lessons of Surinamese birds, the Twa Twa’s, and my inner record player all came together in a rich contrapuntal journey.

The inner street. Words couldn’t be more concrete, entirely in line with the architectural vision of the desired Utopia, the Bijlmer. The inner street, a public walkway on the first floor that connected both residential blocks of the apartment complex, conceived as a bustling promenade full of entertainment. Ultimately, there couldn’t have been a greater contrast.

Where no grass grew, we found beauty in potential. On rainy days, we spent hours in the long empty corridors of concrete, steel, and glass. Everything was explored. The mailboxes, resembling miniature metal flats, stood on legs and had pointed roofs. Since nothing was pointed in our surroundings except the neighbor’s teeth, this sparked our imagination. They were like safes filled with gold coins from a pirate movie to us, and we read each other the names on the mailboxes to fantasize about their lives and origins. Sometimes, we came across a name we knew from school or the neighborhood.

Further down the inner street stood a large wooden artwork, a kind of letterbox you could see through. Because we had no idea why it was there and what purpose it served, it gave us a serene kind of fascination. Very different from the large waste disposal areas with wheeled containers, hidden behind swinging doors emitting an intense smell.

The letterbox had a scent and gleamed, and we hid our found treasures in it, along with notes written to each other in secret code. Every once in a while, the letterbox would be cleaned, and then we’d lose everything. As children, we could let our imaginations run wild in the inner street.

In the evening, the brightly lit and deserted inner street became a catwalk for prey.