this passage connects lage nieuwstraat with warmoezierstraat, but does not have a name itself.
you can enter the building of my studio in this passage, but i have never seen anyone do it.
the passage is maybe 80% bricks.
the rest is concrete, glass, metal, and living beings.
people walk through here a lot in the day, but at night it's very quiet.
the brick floor of the alley provides a grid, like a math book.
i thought a way to collaborate could be to find a way to use this grid.
so, the place provides me with a grid, but i asked myself what i can contribute with in this collaboration. some playfulness perhaps, i answered myself.
this place could need some play in my eyes. of course, i cannot ask the place for an affirmation, but i can give it this as an exchange for providing me with a grid. if the place does not like it, at least i can give it a new experience.
i think it is a collaboration, but i can never now if the place considers it a collaboration or a disturbance.
in the period between 18:44 to 19:08 i spent 24 minutes in the alley between lage nieuwstraat and warmoezierstraat
In this period I was passed by 25 or 26 people.
All of them except one looked away when I returned their gaze.
3 of them were in a group,
and 6 of them were in a couple.
They mostly came by foot,
but I was also passed by
about 4 bikes.
one of them struggled to get through the vehicle blocker in one end of the alley, and seemed quite frustrated when he passed me.
Another one I watched through the window as he was taking his bike out of the storage space of lage nieuwstraat 549, before exiting the building into the alley, and taking off on his bike. His trip from entering the storage space to getting on his bike took about 1 minute, which I would say is a pretty good time. 10 minutes later he came back, and 1 minute later his bike was safe in the storage space, and he was gone. That reminded me that I have to email my landlord to ask them how I can access the storage space of my address, so I can store my bike safely too.
The two other bikes passed me at separate times, but did not make any deal out of it worth writing about.
1 electric scooter.
I assume this guy was delivering food, because he passed me 3 times. He also struggled with the vehicle blocker in the alley, but was not faced by it. He kept checking his phone, and the numbers on the door where you can enter the building where I live.
1 car.
Two people from DHL came in a van that said "sneltransport". They drove through the alley in a speed that I deemed unnecessarily when witnessing it, and stopped right in front the vehicle block. Then they exited the vehicle and disappeared around the corner into warmoezierstraat.
1 motorcycle.
The person on the motorcycle came through the vehicle block, quite smoothly, but made it through just as the car with DHL people came to a halt. From where I stood, I perceived the car as way too close to the vehicle block for the motorcycle to pass, and for a brief moment I anticipated an interaction between the two parts because of this clash of interest. But the motorcycle passed the car with ease, and blasted off through the alley, also, in my humble opinion, a bit too heavy on the throttle. It is after all supposed to be a motor-vehicle-free alley.
In the midst of all this passing, a person entered their balcony on the 2nd floor of the building on the east wall of the alley (which is actually the same building as I live in). This happened about 1 minute before the church bells rang 7 times. The person was smoking, and was sitting on the balcony doing so until the very moment I decided to leave the alley, at which point they also decided to go in.
All the while, the sound of a shooting game filled the alley (among other generic, expected sounds such as wind, trams, cars, bikes, footsteps, voices of people passing by, and so forth). The sound came from my neighbor, who has a window facing the passage.
Since it’s autumn some dead leaves laid on the brick floor of the alley. They were mostly laying in the angle in between the alley brick floor and the wall of my building, but one was laying just in the middle of it. On closer inspection, I noted that over 90% of those leaves were from a maple tree, which does not exist in the alley. I later found that there are four maple trees growing outside the entrance of the hospital entrance in warmoezierstraat, and my guess is that the leaves in the alley come from there. The pear trees in the alley are still green, although they have lost their green summertime, photosynthetic prime time glow.
in the passage there is one metal box suited for storing a four wheeled scooter. i have never seen it in use, but there could very well be a scooter inside at all times. there is three of them parked next to it, against the wall of the building where i live.
today, and every day since the 80s, the houses of hofje van nieuwkoop are housing units for those who can afford it. to find out the price of these houses you have to pay an annual subscription of 95€.
i have a friend who used to live, possibly squatting it, in one of these houses in the 80s or 90s.
when you walk from the main entrance of the hospital, the first 15 meters of the passage is a smoke free zone.
this building serves as one of the two walls in this passage. it is a building made almost exclusively of orange bricks. i believed this building to be a morgue. it has no windows or ornaments, and it is right next to the hospital, so why not?
after further research i found that this is hofje van nieuwkoop, a courtyard built in 1660 by johan de bruijn van buijtewech, lord of nieuwkoop and achttienhoven. the courtyard is on the other side of the wall from the passage. the houses around the courtyard were intended for "poor and needy widows".
i have a theory that this courtyard was extremely beautiful to look at, and for that reason they completely forgot to put windows in the back of the houses. this is why the wall in the passage is so very, very orange.
there are 3 trees in the passage, of the type pyrus communis. apparently that's a type of tree that grows pear, so that's something to keep an eye out for.
this is the balcony of my neighbor and friend Alu. from his balcony you can see the passage in its entirety.
i found this hole in the alley, where trash and dead leaves end up. it seems the ground just sunk beneath the bricks, creating a dent in the ground.
my idea came from this exercise of subverting boredom on the train, loosely inspired by Georges Perec's prompt to exhaust a place by analyzing and explaining every observation in the place.
i was thinking about where a place starts and ends, what is within it and what is outside of it.
it was also a reflection on language in relation to this, how language defines the border of things.
what is a thing in relation to things around it?
i jumped through the alley, one leap at a time.
for each leap i marked the bricks my foot landed on
with chalk.
it's an alternative path to leap through the alley.
hopefully the alley appreciates that as much as i do.
also inspired by the infamous square turned circle Thalia drew on the white board in our first class.
note to self
i realized that the proper term to name this place is an "alley", and not passage or corridor.
