Rehabilitation
The medical overtones of the word came three to fours years after the initial conception of this exhibition project, which remain most appropriate regarding the initial focus and scope, i.e. the metamorphosis of a utilitarian architecture into something else, an industrial brewing hall into a post-industrial platform for contemporary art. The long, problematic trajectory of this ‘re-affectation’, with it’s financial and political implications and loopholes, makes the use of medical terminology even more appropriate, since the resurrection from its ruinous condition of the late 1990s to a functional public place in 2007, implied different operations to extend the renovation programme beyond the limitations posed by industrial heritage and landmark preservation. The clinical word ‘rehabilitation’ as used daily by restoration specialists, therefore perfectly applies, indicating the reversion of the advanced state of entropy into which the Blomme building had fallen, and the almost medical ‘curing’ of its remaining elements into the basic structure of the contemporary art centre that would inhabit it in the future. The relatively short period allotted for planning and renovation (2003-2007), implies the questioning of its former function and future use. In opposition to earlier
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generations of artistic investigation into possible platforms for production and presentation, the re-use of derelict post-industrial warehouse or production plant has become a classic solution for these types of spaces. Its potential as an alternative to the aseptic and a-historic white cube making the neutrality of skeletal concrete structures a better solution for a place as well as a space for arts and symbolic exchange, has already created its genealogy. This now includes former SoHo lofts, the collection at Schaffhausen, Dia Chelsea, and innumerable examples of post-industrial-style institutional, private and alternative art spaces. Its hailed neutrality is induced by its texture of rough concrete and orthogonal structure, covering-up the left-over sediment of economical and social spaces with layers of white and grey paint. Post-industrial architecture has - for better or for worse - become a stylistic residue of the era of late capitalism or super-modernity. Its longing for purity or sincerity in the light of the surface-tension of consumer culture, has become a norm, in for genuineness and authenticity. The exhibition project Rehabilitation is not trying to re-open the discussion by bringing a new chapter on the appropriateness of a certain type of high-modernist or post-modernist interpretation of white cubes as art spaces, nor of post-industrial buildings as being the ideal alternative. The clinical nature of the white cube as a discursive and rhetorical entity has installed itself