‘Publiek’ / De Veemvloer Amsterdam / 1997

The Veem, warehouse with its roots in the squatter movement: individuals within a collective, order within a haphazardly developed chaos of high expectations. A chemical marriage: fertile, ambitious and inspiring.
Peter van der Heijden and Paul Vendel investigated the existing power fields in the Veem and requested its users to supply materials.
So the workers in the building brought together: soaps, lonely socks, lost keys, foreign coins, medicines, abandoned stamps, liquor bottles, items borrowed and never returned. Palpable signs evoking a web of social conditions.
Quantities, collected, arranged and investigated as if it was genetic material.
All those objects fixed together, qualities transformed into systems, molecules or even milky ways. Twelve works for the Veem.