Freek Drent made this presentation together with Stella van Voorst van Beest in Museum Boijmans. The installation consists of films, plastic flats and trains. Quote text Wilma Sutto curator: Drent and van Voorst chiefly filmed in Transsylvania, where systematization was quitte far advanced. Still, the contrast is great between the flats and the immediately surrounding countryside.
Strips of greenery serve as vegetable gardens, while geese rummage along the avenues between the puddles where the clouds are reflected. Here too, the inhabitants draw attention to the unfulfilled promise of a market complex and a motel in the foothills, neither of which were built. Building Blocks portrays both the block housing and the residents, who add a quirky character to the uniform architecture.
Wizened old people still remember how the land was taken away from the farmers; a desillusioned man tells that half the neighbourhood is empty because of unemployment following the closure of the mines. Others are more cheerful: the icon-maker, who strives after divinity in his mosaiques, earning enough to be branded a capitalist, and the rockers who practise Satanism because they consider it to be the ‘religion of the individual not of the masses’.