During my third year at the HKU we were offered the opportunity to create an installation for the Over het IJ festival, a festival about the north of Amsterdam. Our group consisted of 5 people. After the initial briefing we set out to the north of Amsterdam.
At first we wanted to create a high-tech installation that used a natural interface to create a merging between the past and
present of the area. But it proved difficult, both in deciding on a
concept and on how we would style it. Eventually, after some
deliberation, we decided to drop the whole idea and focus on the core
of the festival.
The Over het IJ festival is about the people of Amsterdam-north. Building on the festival's theme of "believing", we went to Floradorp and created a whole new concept. In this rather poor area, people spent a lot of money on their gardens, they created their own little paradise. We videotaped a number of people and their gardens and turned this into little video stories about their gardens.
In the installation itself these videos could be played by pulling down the doorhandles of tiny garden doors that were inspired by the gardens of these people. You literally opened the door to their gardens.