Ellen Kooi Above Rotterdam

Ellen Kooi Above Rotterdam. One Glass Tower by Wiel Arets & Nine Situations by Katrien Van den Brande. Ellen Kooi Above Rotterdam, a new book that explores hybrid-modernity, residential repetition, and vertical urbanity, in the work of Wiel Arets Architects. Colliding modern architecture, theatrically informed photography, and surreal poetry and prose; this carefully-crafted collaboration between artist Ellen Kooi, architect Wiel Arets, and artist Katrien Van den Brande documents five sets of highly-staged visual scenarios , and nine textual situations , of numerous imaginary guests, who simultaneously inhabit the B Tower a high-rise in the center of Rotterdam. Each scenario was dreamt up, created, and captured on camera by Kooi; each of Van den Brande s situations were written while staying at the tower, in the guise of the many other, unseen , temporary tower guests. High above the streets of Rotterdam, on cold winter nights, during early spring evenings, and dusky autumn days; five situations were staged and captured by Ellen Kooi, inside the B´ Tower in Rotterdam, by Wiel Arets. Nearly each apartment is identical, which lends a receded repetition to the stage sets Kooi created, in the tradition of her renowned landscape photography. In Kooi s sets , a sleeping young girl cuddles with whimsical Weimaraners; a lonely business man digitally pines for his distant love; a young couple saunters and seduces one another, inside and out; an informal dinner gathering morphs into an impromptu musical; a mother creates a dream world for her and her children, high above Rotterdam s streets. Interspersed throughout Kooi´s sets of imagery are separately created scenes of poetry and prose, by Katrien Van den Brande, which alternate with Kooi´s narratives all graphically woven together by a design from Mainstudio. This publication is a two-dimensional immersion into a parallel urban reality, that s at once fantasy and fiction yet remarkably familiar.