We may never tire of new ways to interject some spontaneous green space into a concrete cityscape. Kevin van Braak’s caravan takes a top spot on our urban intervention favorites list. It’s a mobile trailer that unfolds into an elevated park replete with a fire circle and wildflowers.
Most information we found on the Dutch artist is [obviously] in Dutch, which leaves us depending upon Babelfish for detailed interpretation. Luckily the intention behind the project doesn’t require too much guessing; though from the translation, it seems that besides simply reintroducing nature in the concrete jungle, Braak aims to address cultural issues such as individuality vs. community, and the role of religion and ritual in group experience. If you want to read the whole semi-sensical Babelfish translation, read on…
“Under group shelter I understand a spot which offers protection. Protection of lijf and ideas. Body and spirit. The contemporary group shelter not only needs be a physical spot true people can hide, but can also in mentally or mental area manifest itself. At this moment is considered religion to me as a most dominant group shelter. From way back between religious stromingen group feelings are mutually finished under the mom of religious truth and justice. The conflict situations which have arisen this way, have enlarged things on sharply put. That happens now, in our society. Religious symbols and rituals play a large role. At the latest show where you belong to. By presuppositions concerning religions those symbols can will lead their own life. A symbol stands then for a complete religion, irrespective of the vele interpretations and the individual perception of it. You dovetail a religion, and are characterised by the symbol of it, also self-protection offers beside protection. A form of shielding. Because individual people in conflict situations disappear to the context, that self-protection is undermined paradoxically enough. The individual opinion becomes surplus a compromise for the opinion of the group. The voltrekking of such a process do think sublimatie (concisely in the work of Freud) of the medical-philosophical term, with which a change of primitive impulse expressions in strevingen of higher, raised level is indicated.”
+Kevin van Braak +Religious Sublimation
