Varios Barrios

Solo exhibition at ARCO MADRID
Site specific installation and drawings
16- 20 february 2011
MKgallerie Booth 8A15

 

 

Varios Barrios is an installation which visualizes flows of traffic around five different squares and blocks in the city of Madrid.

As a visual artist, Willem Besselink (1980, The Netherlands) is fascinated by the beauty of the regularities and patterns that lie hidden underneath everyday life, however chaotic it appears at first glance. In his works, that range from large scale site-specific installations to animations and drawings, Besselink visualizes these hidden patterns. His works take their shape from sets of objectified data turned into graphs; however, by omitting any explanatory information, the work takes on an autonomous visual presence in its own right.

Thus, the installation Varios Barrios, made specifically for and in Madrid, is derived from daily traffic flows in the city. On December 13 and 14, 2010, Besselink observed and indexated all traffic passing during one minute the four streets surrounding five squares and blocks in Madrid including for example Plaza de España and the block around the Prado.

The installation is a visualisation of these observations. It consists of five multicoloured towers – one for each square – of wooden beams. Each side of a tower represents one of the four streets; the wooden beams visualize the movements of traffic – cars, represented by a red beam, pedestrians by a pink beam etc. The towers are stacked up from below, corresponding with the exact chronology of the various traffic movements in each street of the five squares during the one-minute observation there.