For over a decade, Nabuurs&VanDoorn have examined how images, archives, and urban space shape perception. Their publication Greyzones, marks a shift from site-specific intervention toward instruction-based performance. In the following conversation with art historian and curator Erika Radonic , the book emerges not as a document of completed actions, but as an operative device, one that moves with the reader and recalibrates how space is encountered in the present.

Where conceptual art once treated the image as a site of meaning, inquiry now shifts to the infrastructures that make perception possible. Color overlays are not decoration, they are instructions, revealing systems otherwise invisible: signaling protocols, mapping conventions, behavioral logics.

Looking back from Amsterdam to Los Angeles, The Living Atlas reveals less a series of discrete projects than a continuously shifting working environment. The studio never stayed in one place; it moved with us, dissolved, reassembled. The method; walking, mapping, dividing, color-coding, instructing—remained, but its function never fixed.

Washed up. Tide, debris, or the strange feeling of being past usefulness. While developing Backdoor Rebel Routes for Bad Girls for the Intersections program at 18th Street Arts Center, we started mapping the shoreline between the Palisades and Marina del Rey. We collected fragments left behind: driftwood, bones, toys, tiny pieces of someone else drifting in

Lace entered our practice before a grand theory caught up. We weren’t looking for symbolism, we watched light in slow motion. In Angelic Space (2005), lace became an anti-screen: not a surface that receives an image, but one that distorts it. Projections pass through holes instead of landing cleanly. Color scatters. Shadows leaks. At first, nothing resolves. Then, slowly, perception clicks. The image doesn’t appear, it is assembled in the viewer’s mind. Slow-motion seeing ch

Greyzones Revisited shifts attention from retrieval to circulation: to how artworks persist through language, how they disappear without vanishing, how institutions remember through text as much as through objects.

Los Angeles has long operated through projection, not only as image, but as spatial reality. Light settles on surfaces, narratives overwrite land, and futures are rehearsed while the ground beneath them continues to shift. Working along the coastline, where erosion, regulation, and speculation converge, we find ourselves in a transitional phase.

From Weegee’s crime scenes to Debord’s dérives, Zorn’s rule-based improvisation, and Nabuurs&VanDoorn’s performative mapping, there is a continuous fascination with the city as a site of unpredictability, improvisation, and layered narratives. In all these works, “grasping” the city in its entirety is impossible; the point is to navigate, respond, and engage with what emerges—turning maps, images, and scores into living, evolving experiences.

In the gallery at SCOPE BLN, a ten-metre canvas stands in the centre of the space, rising the full height of the room. It doesn’t behave like a painting. It behaves like a presence; leaning, twisting, folding itself around the air. You don’t look at it. You watch it, like you watch a screen, or a fire, or the city at night from a tram window. Something that keeps moving even when it appears to pause.

Anti-painting gestures, we deploy erasure and absence as generative tools. Censor texts, rewrite form; absence speaks. Maps, images, and instruction-based protocols form open systems, activated by performers, collaborators, and viewers alike.

At Nieuw en Meer, Nabuurs&VanDoorn filmed a sunrise over an Amsterdam lake, serene yet shadowed by loss, and transform it into a five-channel, topsy-turvy text-video spelling “d r i f t,” reflecting memory, metamorphosis, and the impermanence of movement.

When human and algorithm collide to co-compose urban memory, place, and performance.

Distorted Notes on “Incubating Narratives, Haegue Yang”, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Oct. 04, 2025

A vessel of experiments, not solutions: Berlin dreams forward. Art offers fresh air, not answers—tenderness as promise, conversation as future.

Art as contact zone: Nabuurs&VanDoorn’s Penance and Rehabilitation confronts memory, endurance, and freedom in fractured Europe.

Abstract Resonances explores how Nabuurs&VanDoorn transform archival fragments into living art, reimagining memory, city, and imagination in new ways.

Berlin’s myth has rotted. From cracks and peripheries, a new art emerges: jagged, unfinished, alive. Freedom stirs where noise begins.

A manifesto of future art forms: off-center, subversive, unfinished. We build yes-spaces, echo communities, and celebrate art as alive.

affective data into instructions for performance. Each mapped location becomes a minute of play, where colors, numbers, words, and images fuse into actions.

Mapping the City Through Affective Data: Nabuurs&VanDoorn transform urban experience into color-coded, perceptual maps that reveal hidden social, cultural, and emotional dynamics, connecting Dutch artistic traditions to contemporary city life.