At the confluence of the Rhine and the Meuse sits Rotterdam. Her eyes looking west, out into the cold, muddy Noordzee and across the Atlantic to America, her heart plugged into the brooding river waters flowing ceaselessly out from Mitteleuropa. Words, ideas, memories, ghosts; strange fruits from the mid-lands of Europe all pass this way. Eventually.
Fractals of Winter
A very strange city which someone once described to me as having its head in America and its heart in Europe. I think she meant that the architecture, at least some of the newer buildings, has an American effervescence about it; while the topography, the deep topography, is rooted heart and soul in Europe. I see parallels between this website and the work of Nick Papadimitriou and John Rogers in London. But the parallels are only in certain shared concepts – this blog is unique and strangely addictive.
Urban exploration – Scientific observation – The invisible city – Psychogeography – Conceptual art
That is what we are promised, and that is what we get. It doesn’t really matter which person the blog belongs to as Rotterdam is the star. Rotterdam is the subject matter. The artist sets out to paint a picture of her and, in a glorious, splattering way, he succeeds. He brings Rotterdam to life and she speaks to us.
He writes about cryptoforests and rooftop human sacrifices. Agoraphobia and taxonomies of invisibility. We play Psychogeography bingo. We learn how to create spam poetry. Heady stuff, in every sense of the word.
Pyramids
His writing is glorious. I am a native English speaker and writer, but I despair of ever being able to write with the verve that colours everything we read on this site. Perhaps it is the fact that he is writing in someone else’s language that gives the words he chooses a kind of hypnotic strangeness. But his words perfectly complement the beauty of the pictures he uses. He shows us a mundane beauty, reflecting and then creating liminal places within the urban landscape. And it’s not just the way he frames the shot, or how he presents the pictures within his blog, but it is his feel for colour that I enjoy the most. Urban Adventure in Rotterdam. Go there!
(All images reproduced courtesy of the owner, Urban Adventure in Rotterdam)
