Pin Up Girl for Maas Vlakte 2
While the Harbour of Rotterdam is being enlarged into the open see, also the Radar-tower has to be relocated. It is 70 meters high and with a concrete shaft with 5,50m in diameter. Therefore the landscape designers “West 8” made a pitch and invited 3 offices to come up with a proposal for a Landmark. My idea was to make a giant neon pin-up girl. My stream of thought about was the following:
Seeing the pictures of the existing cost of the harbour it’s so large scale and so industrial that another building wouldn’t stick out too much. The ships, the cranes, the barrels, the vast mass of containers have already such an impact! The shipping industry is growing and growing and all the symbolic meaning of a harbour seems to disappear. Not too long ago making a journey over the ocean was a almost life-threatening undertaking. People would search for their future in Argentinia or Brasil. Today you go to the supermarket and your mango comes from there and the kiwi from New Zealand and no one waists a thought about it. All those oceans seem to be so easily to be crossed by cheap 5 cent products, fruits, electronics, cloth, cars - anything!
With the pin-up I wanted to relate more to the romanticism and adventure of sailing. More the rough world of dirty harbour, cheap labour, pirates, whorehouses, cheap love, tattoos, a few nights out after month at sea.
Weird enough Rotterdam lost this entire atmosphere (– probably thanks to the sound working bombs of my grandfather –) or at least I haven’t discovered it yet. In my first sketches I copied the cowboy and –girl from Las Vegas and an anchor of a Hamburg bar (which still lives of the rock n roll left-wing squatter red-light Mafia image in opposite to Rotterdam with its trance, techno, Hardcore scene).
A pin-up in Rotterdam would probably as fake as a cowboy in Vegas. In reality the sailors maybe satisfy most of there hunger as anyone with internet porn and I wonder if you could even pick out a sailor of a cargo ship in the streets today. He will most likely just appear as a regular guy.
Anyhow as a contradiction I’m still fascinated by it. The pin-up should be curvier then the first sketches. All the girls in the office are complaining she was not really hot yet. I need to practice harder or get a tattoo artist evolved.
I checked for some attributes like the steering wheel, the anchor, stars, ropes, a sail ship or swallow and maybe even a heart. Maybe they should accompany her somehow.*
fall 2008
Commissioner: West 8, Harbor Rotterdam
