Stijn ter Braak has based his artistic practice in recent years primarily on what people throw away. He used to rummage through trash bins and containers himself — but for the first time, he’s turned that process around. For Paradys, Ter Braak placed a 25-cubic-meter container on the Voorstreek in Leeuwarden, where neighbors could drop off their waste. He sat beside it every day. After the collection period ended, he spent five weeks transforming the contents into a large-scale artwork inside the container — about the neighborhood — as if he turned both his own method and the world outside the container inside out. As he puts it:
“That one thing can be or become something else is, to me, magical, human, and controversial. The fact that an object made from worthless, discarded material can simultaneously be a valuable artwork is one such example.”
In Werk in uitvoering (Work in Progress), Ter Braak meticulously recreated the surrounding shops, homes, trees and traffic on a small scale using the donated materials. What appears to be the outer street façade also reveals, through the neighborhood’s discarded items, glimpses of the life hidden behind those façades. A large part of the waste was used to raise the level of the ‘street’ inside the container — a nod to the way Leeuwarden was built on three mounds (terpen), historically raised using contemporary waste. With Werk in uitvoering, Ter Braak invites us to reconsider our relationship with objects, and how something can be both worthless and valuable at once.