The Living Atlas — Nomadic Working Environments (2025-26)
- Nabuurs&VanDoorn
- 10 minutes ago
- 2 min read
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.
In Amsterdam, Re-coding the Comatorium, the city was a grid. Forty points, photographs overlaid with color, collages inscribed with instruction. The system promised legibility. Color acted less as illustration than as interference, a visible insistence on the act of seeing. The atlas could be followed, traced, read—almost architectural in its logic.
Lisbon, Mapping Minor Modes of Multiple Muted Memories, shattered that logic. The line unfolded into the city. Found objects, gestures, encounters: the city itself became collaborator, material, medium. Cue cards detached color from image; performers enacted instructions in public space. The atlas became temporal, handled, unstable, activated rather than observed. Instruction fragmented into parallel existences: map, action, text, color.
Berlin, Transversal Zigzag Through Phantom Zones, made the score sculptural. The instructions materialized as site-specific painting, a residue of what had already occurred. The line persisted, but shifted: route to trace, method to memory. The score stopped pointing forward, it settled as object, briefly, precariously, stubbornly present.
Los Angeles, Backdoor Rebel Routes for Bad Girls, returned the line as narrative. The walk became performance-lecture; the city spoke back. Incidental, absurd, intimate, political events inserted themselves, not feedback, but constraint. The method folded under experience; the system failed, folded, bent. Vulnerability became structure.
Across locations, the method was constant but contingent. Studio, performance, exhibition, residue: distinctions collapsed. Each walk, each encounter, each residency unfolded conditions for the next. The work does not leave the studio, it is the studio, redistributed.
Our residencies are neither production sites nor performance arenas alone. They are living, working, staging, folding into one another. The atlas moves with us, accumulates, shifts, breathes (John C. Welchman’s on Paul McCarthy in “house, yard, studio, set” The Everywhere Studio, Miami: Institute of Contemporary Art, 2017).
The Living Atlas is biography, not project. Map to line, location to point, color to field, instruction to text. Not a system to master, but a method to inhabit. Always provisional. Always open. Always in motion.
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