An Ark Surfing Out of the Forest
Joep van Lieshout interview

by Max Bruinsma

In 2011, Dutch artist Joep van Lieshout designed a cabin for the Colombian art foundation Más Arte Más Acción. The brief was: a simple refuge for visiting artists and scholars, who were invited by MAMA to experience this remote spot on the coast of Chocó province in Colombia, on the edge of the rainforest and the Pacific Ocean, and to engage with local communities. An exchange between the urban centers of the world and the perifery of isolated communities. I spent a week there in November 2012, in what had become a very special place, built from local materials on the sturdy base of a giant tree, that had been felled decades before to carve canoes from its straight stem. What was left was a ten meter long crooked trunk, half embedded in the soft soil between the forest and the ocean. On returning to Amsterdam, I spoke with Van Lieshout – he showed me his sketches and I showed him my photos – he had not yet visited his materialized design, which was made to his specifications by local craftsmen.
Below are some excerpts of our conversation in Amsterdam, on December 13th, 2012.

"It looks exactly like my drawing; just like I imagined it. I do hope the deck feels stable. The fact that it slopes down towards the center of the house and then up again is dictated by the form of the tree. There's no way around that. Conceptually, I like that: that the design, the architecture is determined by external factors such as in this case the form of the tree trunk. It means that the location of the house is fixed. You can't move it or change it's orientation. The tree trunk determines the essence of the design brief. That's the nice thing – the fun, if you will – of this house: that its basic parameters, its length, width, orientation, are all a function of the tree trunk, which has been lying there for over sixty years because the grandfather of a neighbor needed some of the wood for a couple of canoes and left the rest where it fell..."

"I came here without a plan, with just some vague ideas. One of the ideas I got when I first saw the place, at the edge of the rain forest, was to build a complete contrast to this environment, a modernistic steel white cube. But there were other ideas too. In the Netherlands I would have been inclined to make an archetypal farm-style house with a louvre roof and an annex. But in Chocó, I was really quite blank. So when I spotted the giant tree trunk at the back of the garden, I immediately saw you could build a house on it. The next day I said: Let's make a model. I wanted to set up the outlines of the house, the way I imagined them, in a one-on-one mock-up with bamboo stems, to see if it worked. Because it's not easy to gauge the geometry of such a twisted old tree trunk. So with the help of neighbors we set up the contours of the house with bamboo from a nearby bush to judge the balance between length, width and height of the volume. For me, the balance between those dimensions is crucial. After we did that, I started sketching on the basis of the model..."

"Generally, my work is rather independent of location, although when I make something on-site I usually relate it to aspects of the environment or its history. Here in Chocó, however, the situation imposes huge limitations on the choices you can make. A steel cube with large glass surfaces would have been extremely complicated here. But here you have the possibility to cut your own wood and use it to make something with local methods and tools and craftsmen. That is fantastic, because in the West you can't do that so easily. Just the cost of labor alone would hover like Damocles' sword over any project you'd want to do in this manner. Here in Chocó that sword is: anything that cannot be provided locally."

"The cabin is almost entirely made with local materials, techniques and people, but its concept and form are from another planet. In that, it reflects the themes of Más Arte Más Acción of connecting Western, urban ideas and esthetics of dwelling and architecture with local rural traditions and customs. Not in an imperialist way, though, which would have been the case with the white cube."

"Frankly, I am quite curious to know what the locals think of it. The architecture of the cabin is light and open, just like the houses they usually build in this region. On the other hand, I hope my design also inspires people to think more about the use of space and the balance between inside and outside of the house. In the customary way of building a house here, people make little use of the space around the house and the transition from outside to inside. You see few terraces or patios."

"Many of my designs, especially my machines, are unusual because of their high level of improvisation. If you want complex machines, but can't buy them 'off the shelf', you need to tinker your own versions. This kind of improvising with materials and tools at hand to a large degree determines the look and feel of what you make in this way. So, working within the limitations of what you have is an important theme in my work. The main difference of this house, compared to my other work, is that I didn't build it myself or didn't at least supervise the building. That was impossible in this case. I greatly admire Fernando and Jonathan for the way they managed it. And the main carpenter, Fecho, did a fantastic job! This is a lot harder than building a house – it's more like building a boat, with those ribs attached to a central 'keel'. Fecho understood that very well; he has a lot more capabilities than he can usually show in this region. The cabin is built solidly, compared to other houses in the neighborhood. Sturdy like an Ark. It looks like a boat surfing out of the forest..."

"I'd love to come back some time. Not just to sit in my cabin – although I can imagine that would be interesting –, but above all to really go into the forest, to be there for a couple of weeks or months. To live with an Embera tribe and join them when they go hunting and fishing. There are so few places left where one can experience almost no influence of the West on a community's way of life. It's not that I see that as a kind of utopia, but more because I'm really interested in a way of life that is largely self-supporting."

max bruinsma