Advertising column campaign
13 advertising columns In The Hague South WestDate: 1 October - 31 December 1995
Location: shopping center De Dreef, The Hague
With the redevelopment of the former shopping center De Dreef in The Hague Southwest, the artist Adriaan Nette decided to establish regular contact with the residents of the neighborhood. Among other things, it came up that the present condition of the advertising columns was typical of deterioration in the neighborhood. They were hardly, if at all, used for current advertising. Nette proposed involving artists. He designed the first series of posters for the 13 columns to be up during the last months of 1995. From responses to an advertisement in the magazine BK Informatie, three artists were chosen to begin work in 1996.
Realised proposals
Adriaan Nette
A fictitious product Xemborita
Since Nette came up with the idea of involving artists with a project to work on advertising columns in the southwest of The Hague, he took the initiative himself and set the ball rolling in September 1995. He started with black and white posters made up of frontal portraits of boys and girls from the neighborhood with a series of shots of the family around the edge. On the bottom the word Xemborita was printed in big letters. A puzzle. At the Thomas More College they made a project out of analyzing the possible meaning of it.
Rob Blok
Wallpaper from the '60s and '70s
Having grown up in this neighborhood, he wanted to expose the inner world of the closed apartment blocks to the outside. He plastered all of the columns with wallpaper from the sixties and seventies. In this way, each column had a different flower, wild design or geometric pattern. This major face-lift accentuated the monumental scale of the columns and their strategic placement.
Eddy Marwel-Said
Photographs of neighborhood residents
For each column, Marwel-Said made a separate photographic collage (b & w) comprised of pictures of residents living in the immediate vicinity of the columns that he had photographed: shop owners, children at play and unusual situations on the street. He sees it as an homage to everyday people in an average neighborhood in The Hague.
Barney de Krijger
Eyes and texts about seeing
De Krijger covered the columns with enlarged photographs of eyes, 3 stripes with eyes in red, yellow and blue. Underneath, technical information in a text originating from a users' manual for a light meter from the turn of the century. ‘Dark: very dark objects and large heads; Cloud: glacier and snow, sea and lake, without ships; Dunes: dunes, beach with beach scene, pond and river'.