STAMP ALERT – Home Dweller’s Journey

Title: STAMP ALERT – Home Dweller’s Journey
Year: 2024
Artist: Anne de Vries

In Collaboration With:
Contributors: Mansur Suri (main actor), Leonardo Reuvenkamp (3D animator)
Produced in Collaboration With: ODYSSEY, Cologne

Description: Life-sized video projection of a virtual apartment inhabited by the character De Wachter. The apartment also features the video STAMP ALERT, a fictional news program presented by Anya Demure.

Resolution: 7680 × 4320 pixels, stereo sound

TRAUMA UNCLOGGED

Title: TRAUMA UNCLOGGED
Year: 2023
Artist: Anne de Vries

Dimensions: Variable
Materials: 14 fully functioning toilets on a dance floor with a light and sound system

Description: This immersive installation features 14 fully functioning toilets on a dance floor, equipped with lights and a sound system. Serving as a stage, it hosted several performers, musicians, and the club night CLUB UNCLOG throughout a one-month exhibition period.
This first incarnation has been hosted and produced by Trauma in Berlin.

Event Program:
April 29th: Opening Night: Evita Manji (live) AMNESIA SCANNER (DJset) SCHIRIN (DJset)
May 4th: TRAUMA UNCLOGGED: PRICE (live performance)
May 11th: TRAUMA UNCLOGGED: Jan Vorisek (live) SADAF (live)
May 20th: CLUB UNCLOG: 7777 の天使, Dmitra, Dasychira, Jasmine Infiniti, DJ Mantis.

In Control

Title: In Control
Artist: Anne de Vries
Year: 2022
Dimensions: Variable
Materials: Fencing, prints on PVC
Description: Banners on the fencing advertise fictitious future events, featuring real locations and dates. It remains unclear whether these events signal a revolution or a party. The visuals, inspired by flyers for Tekno, Hardcore, and Bondage events, form a layered collage. Upon closer inspection, the locations reveal themselves as the headquarters of some of the world’s most environmentally destructive corporations.

Exhibited at: Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem

DAY CARE DRILL

Invitation


Excretion is automatic, but how we do it is not. Parents are advised to teach their children how to use a toilet when they’re around 18-24 months, and diapers are substituted for toddler toilets. Scaled down for smaller limbs, they resemble the real thing but without the architectonic devices — doors, walls, dividers — that define their referent. For what is considered the most intimate of architectural spaces, privacy is earned not given. Like with most training techniques, these are performative objects, like stage sets, upon which the digestive rites of adulthood are mimed under the watchful gaze of parents.

Like children’s toilets, children’s toys are designed more for the buyer than the user. For example, when the toy company Hasbro released the first “G.I. Joe” in 1964, they coined the term “action figure” to appeal to gender-anxious mid-century American parents who didn’t want their boys playing with dolls. Since then, action figure has become the generic eponym for posable plastic toys marketed male — a wide range of products that shift with the times. Not long after the militaristic original hit shelves, cop-themed action figures emerged, including those released in conjunction with the 1970s crime drama show S.W.A.T., which chronicled the fictional adventures of a “Special Weapons And Tactics” team in California.

Violent delights marketed to children, whether action figures or video games, offer a projection screen for the adult world that makes them. For some, they’re the cause of all the blood and guts smeared across our grown-up world — a scapegoat for the AR-15s wielded by young adults (if not those by the men-in-blue who swat them down as they enter school). Others construe them as a cathartic device, or at least a palliative, for the violence that children perceive around them: a way to get your gusto for gore out of the system through play acting. Violence is presented as a socially-transmitted disease, and role-play as either predictive or prophylactic. Everyone eventually grows up, of course; some become cops themselves, while others become collectors. Today 1:6 scale action figures are tailored as much to children as adults — infantilized violence matured into a speculative market.

For DAY CARE DRILL, an exhibition at Blue Velvet Projects in Zürich, Anne de Vries brings his lion-in-knight’s-armor into a drama of toy policing. The exhibition constitutes the next chapter in the avatar’s twisted hero’s journey, which has unfolded across different spaces and pages throughout the last year. Previously the heraldic figure stomped its paws across landscapes of sand, first at Berlin’s Fragile Gallery and later at the former building of the famous Tresorclub. Not long after, the knight became De Wachter: a public sculpture perched on the roof of the Dutch secret service in Zoetermeer. At Blue Velvet Project, the monument peers domestic and dresses in drag. It invades a children’s nursery inflected with sadistic intent — a fever dream of infantilized power and infant power structures. 1:6 scale SWAT figures are made sticky with chocolate syrup, posed on cradles, and deflated by the brass-patinated, engorged paws of de Vries’ heraldic lion in armor. DAY CARE DRILL interrogates childhood tropes as a proxy for adulthood, when role-play delaminates. Characters become identities, props appear structural, and when the performance is misperformed, it signifies something else: artificiality.


Text by Nicholas Korody
The Exhibition is on view at Blue Velvet Projects until October 29th, 2022

Stomping Grounds

Title: STOMPING GROUNDS
Artist: Anne de Vries (in collaboration)
Curators: Adriano Rosselli, Odessa Evelyn Malke
Researcher: Sven von Thülen (der Klang der Familie)
Sand Carvers: Bouke Atema, Jeroen Advocaat
Sound Designers: Rowan Ben Jackson, Odysseas Constantinous
4D Sound Programming: Usomo
Location: Kraftwerk Berlin
About: The art installation Stomping Grounds is a 1:1 replica made from sand of the giant gold vault underneath the Jewish-owned Wertheim building, which after a turbulent history and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 became the cradle of techno music from Detroit, Chicago, the UK, and Germany, known as Tresor.

GILLETTE, IDEAL CITY PROPOSAL


Title: GILLETTE’S, IDEAL CITY PROPOSAL
Artist: Anne de Vries
Year: 2014
Dimensions: Various
Materials: Double-sided UV prints on Photo Forex, PVC, mirror, coated metal hanging system, screws, Gillette razors, clothing.

Conceptual Background:
This body of work draws inspiration from The Dream of King Camp Gillette and his radical proposal for a future urban society. Before becoming known for inventing the safety razor and establishing a major industrial enterprise, King Camp Gillette (1855–1932) authored several books and pamphlets outlining his vision for a transformed economic and social system.

In his first major tract, The Human Drift, Gillette proposed the creation of a single, highly organized, technologically advanced megacity called “Metropolis.” Designed to house the entire population—excluding agricultural and rural labor—this urban complex would be constructed using cutting-edge materials and systems. Gillette envisioned this society as being administered by “The United Company,” a unified organization responsible for producing, manufacturing, and distributing all necessities of life.

Although often grouped with utopian literature such as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, Gillette’s proposal reads not just as speculative fiction, but as a sincere (if eccentric) urban and social engineering plan. As both an inventor and idealist, Gillette’s “Metropolis” functions as a kind of verbal prototype—an industrial-era working model of a unified and optimized future city.

Artistic Approach:
Through precision photographs of Gillette’s shaving products, used as the basis for sculptural forms and visual layering, this work explores the intersections of utopian architecture and the refined industrial design of Gillette’s iconic shaving systems.