STATIONSPLEIN
Analogue gestures
De Vrolijkheid x JIMI KLEINBRUININK
Analog magic lantern
This sculptural echo machine brings images to life using simple materials, mirrors, shadow and movement. To create this analog magic lantern, Jimi Kleinbruinink collaborated with young newcomers living at the asylum seekers’ centre. Over the past weeks, the teenagers experimented with light and collage. They created a range of images on plexiglass, using colourful paper and found materials. Jimi then animates these collage-like works in an impressive open structure, using shadow, reflection and movement.
Audiotour
By joining hands, young newcomers add fresh
colour to the city.
When light hits the moving parts, shadows and reflections begin to dance across the frosted glass and the surrounding space. In those shadows you may recognise new images, sometimes clear, sometimes fleeting like a mirage. You can also look between the panels to see how it works. There is no hidden technology here, but an honest, analog process, and that is exactly what makes it so special. What you see is three-dimensional, but the projections are two-dimensional, as if you are stepping into a moving shadow story. Reflections on the eight sides of frosted glass add yet another layer of wonder.
By joining forces, young newcomers add fresh colour to the city. During the process it became clear how important these hands are. Not only for building together and creating images, but also for communicating. When spoken language is missing, hands are what speak, make and connect. That energy and those gestures return in the multicoloured forms and shadow images that keep moving across the frosted glass and the space around it, sometimes distinct, sometimes only a suggestion. The analog approach stands almost in contrast to the digital world and shows how rich reflection, mirroring and shadow can be, precisely because everything comes from something visible and tangible.
Mirrors, mirages, miracles
Artist Jimi Kleinbruinink works through play as well as method, exploring reflection and shadow as a poetic language. For him, carefully planned steps and spontaneous improvisation are equally important, because they leave room for chance discoveries that open up something new. In workshops with children at the Utrecht asylum seekers’ centre, he noticed how vital non-verbal communication became: hand gestures, shapes and movement. That became a key starting point for this work, an installation that does not begin with language, but with looking, playing and discovering.
KUNSTENAAR
De Vrolijkheid x Jimi Kleinbruinink
I LIGHT U x De vrolijkheid
For four editions, I Light U and De Vrolijkheid have worked together on the creation of a light artwork with the teenagers living at AZC Utrecht. Each year, they invite a light artist to lead workshops with the teenagers, resulting in a light artwork that becomes part of the I Light U exhibition.
De Vrolijkheid
De Vrolijkheid organises art workshops and creative activities at asylum seekers’ centres across the Netherlands. For 25 years, the foundation has organised 100 creative workshops every week at AZCs throughout the country, for children, teenagers and young people.
