Stimuleringsfonds

Our built environment is a source of stories waiting to be told. Michiel van Poelgeest, Janna Bystrykh, and Gyz La Rivière have each taken on the role of storyteller, using the medium of the podcast, the documentary, and the film respectively. With grant support from the Architecture Grant Scheme, they conducted research not only into content but also into form. 'Sometimes it is better to leave a comma in place, rather than putting in a full stop.'

This is a descriptive translation of the original Dutch essay by Sereh Mandias.

The Architecture Grant Scheme supports projects that contribute to the quality, development, or deepening of the field of architecture in the broadest sense. In recent years, the Creative Industries Fund NL has supported three audio(visual) productions in which our relationship to the built environment takes centre stage: Platte Grond, Great Pla/ns, and Malin TV. Sereh Mandias spoke with the makers about the journey they undertook to find the best form for their story.

Michiel van Poelgeest on Platte Grond

Platte Grond, the podcast that Michiel van Poelgeest launched in 2019 together with a small collective of makers, is now three seasons in. The second season was supported by the Creative Industries Fund NL. When Van Poelgeest began working at an architecture centre, he noticed that stories about how the built environment comes into being were reaching only a limited audience.

'I noticed a gap in stories about architecture. When you read about architecture in the newspaper, it tends to be building reviews. They answer the question of why a building is impressive, or why it falls short, but they say nothing about questions like: why is this cycle path here? Architecture is about our living environment. Its design, including major spatial interventions, concerns all of us. With Platte Grond, we want to bring the built environment to people's attention in an engaging and accessible way.

Initially we had a multimedia plan, but that turned out to be far too ambitious. If you want to make a documentary series for Netflix or NPO, you need millions. So we asked ourselves: what other means could we use to present the content at a high level? That is how we arrived at the podcast format.'

A season of Platte Grond is best compared to a literary-journalistic anthology. Each episode is built around a series of interviews centred on a construction project. Nienke de la Rive Box, the podcast's regular host, introduces the topic, and a larger story then emerges through the personal observations of those being interviewed. There is, for instance, the episode 'Duizend Jaar Stapelen' ('A Thousand Years of Stacking'), about artist Louis Le Roy's Ecocathedral. Le Roy developed ideas in the 1970s about the interweaving of nature and culture that, in the light of climate change, remain highly relevant today. Or the episode 'Kantoorgeluk' ('Office Happiness'), about the transformation of the government office building Rijnstraat 8 in The Hague. Through an interview with designer Ellen van Loon, the episode raises the question of what influence our workplace has on our wellbeing.

Finding this framework did not happen overnight, Van Poelgeest explains. 'We made the mistake of starting with a matrix of subjects and themes we thought were important. We wanted to address, for example, the spatial organisation of the Netherlands, or sustainability and transition, and looked into which buildings might be interesting in that context. That already took an enormous amount of time, but in the end we had nothing, because we had no characters and we had no stories.

You can hear us searching in the first season. We experimented with, among other things, a kind of collage-style reportage and a travel journal of someone visiting different projects. And while we were tinkering away, we realised it simply did not work when an omniscient narrator came in to drop Wikipedia-style facts about when, say, a housing estate had been built. It pulled the listener out of the story. What did work was when a resident said, for instance: I have lived here since the beginning, for 85 years already. Show don't tell is an important principle. You have to let the anecdote do the work.'

We notice that subjects and makers find each other.

According to Van Poelgeest, a story is shaped not only by the people who speak in it. The specific maker of each episode also has a major impact. 'We notice that subjects and makers find each other. Or stories and storytellers. Because to make a story, you have to have an interest in it. René (van Es, a podcast and radio maker who is part of Platte Grond's core team) made a story about wind turbines. He has been interested in engineering since childhood, and interviews people who are passionate about those ugly old wind turbines. If I had made that story, it would have been less authentic.

In the most recent season there is a story by Chris Bajema (a radio maker who joined Platte Grond in the third season). He brings his own completely distinctive voice to a story about a cauliflower suburb. His narration has very little to do with traditional journalism. It became an intensely personal collage of what such a neighbourhood is, and through it he captures precisely what makes those unassuming suburbs tick. So the way he tells it fits the story and the subject perfectly.'

Janna Bystrykh on Great Pla/ns

In August 2019, Janna Bystrykh, architect and head of the Master's programme in Architecture at the Academy of Architecture Amsterdam, was sitting at a kitchen table in North Dakota. Across from her sat precision farmer Paul Overby, who told her about the use of modern technology in his farming process. 'As the conversation went on, it moved more and more towards regenerative agriculture and what that means: that by farming in a particular way, you can restore your land.'

The subject stayed with Bystrykh. 'I found it so fascinating that I wanted to understand it better. I see regenerative agriculture as a form of transformative practice, because it is about the overhaul of a system. It is about social cohesion and a healthy living environment, about restoring the soil and the ecosystem, and about encouraging local, small-scale food chains.' A year later, Bystrykh reached out to Overby again. 'I asked him: how large is the community of regenerative farmers? Is it a community? Is there a story to be told from north to south?' His enthusiastic response marked the starting point of the project that would eventually lead to the film Great Pla/ns.

The film shows a heavily cultivated landscape gliding past in aerial view: a perfectly straight road down the centre, and vast fields stretching out on either side. In razor-sharp images, the film captures the shifting patterns, activities, vegetation, and colours of the Great Plains, a vast region in the heart of North America known for its large-scale agriculture. The shots are taken from altitude, yet the cattle and horses on the ground are still clearly distinguishable. In voice-over, a chorus of voices speaks about regenerative agriculture.

From the outset, the idea was: let the landscape speak.

Paul Overby proved to be the gateway to an extensive network of people from the regenerative movement. After the Creative Industries Fund NL approved the grant application, Bystrykh got to work on what would ultimately become 57 interviews. 'We began each interview with the question: can you describe your regenerative landscape? One person started by talking about the soil and its composition, another about the geological layers, yet another about the landscape and the view. The interviews yielded deeply personal stories about someone's relationship to the land.'

The conversations were new, but the raw footage for the film had been sitting on the shelf for some time. Through one of her students, Bradley Kraushaar, Bystrykh had previously come into contact with the Great Plains. 'He was researching custom harvesters: people who harvest crops for other farmers or companies as a profession. The landscape stayed with me after his research. As a result of agricultural policy and market economics, the ecosystem had been severely disrupted.' In that context, Bystrykh collaborated with Demir Purisic, Ximena de Villafrance, and Kraushaar to produce drone footage of the Great Plains for Countryside, The Future, the exhibition by Rem Koolhaas and his think tank AMO that was shown at the Guggenheim in New York in 2020.

'From the outset, the idea was: let the landscape speak. The contrast alone between what people often associate with cultivated landscapes (those large, straight plains) and the reality of regenerative agriculture as it emerges from the conversations is telling. This form of farming is anything but linear; it is about what can be done differently, how much life there is in the soil, and so on.

Still from Great Pla/ns van Janna Bystrykh

The film follows the route of the custom harvesters, who travel from north to south. In each state, we tried to capture the colours and contrasts as fully as possible. And precisely because the different voices reinforce each other thematically from different locations, we felt it would be powerful to keep the visuals continuous. There was an element of chance and surprise in the making: when compiling the film, footage and interviews sometimes fell into place by coincidence. At other times, we were deliberately searching for specific moments. With certain words, you want something to shift in the image, or precisely not to.'

The relative independence of image and sound creates a great deal of room for interpretation. It is not always clear whether the images you see illustrate what is being said. As a result, the film raises all kinds of questions: what does regenerative agriculture actually look like? This appears to be a natural landscape, but perhaps it is just as artificial as the crop circles mentioned earlier? What a beautiful image, but perhaps I am looking at a completely disrupted ecosystem? That is not to say there are no connections; here and there, striking interactions arise between image and sound, such as a shot of enormous crop circles at the moment the intertitle 'food landscapes' appears on screen. These are moments that stand out and help determine the rhythm of the film.

When compiling the film, footage and interviews sometimes fell into place by coincidence.

Where the final edit was initially based on substantive considerations, formal criteria began to carry increasing weight towards the end. 'At a certain point it was almost an acoustic edit. We were looking for a good cadence and tone, and the right balance between the different voices in the film. As a result, some fragments were dropped at a late stage. As we progressed, we found that a staccato of voices worked well in the audio. In the end, we compressed the film to 39 minutes. Its compact and abstract quality ensures that all attention goes to the ecosystem of the landscape and its many possible meanings. That was our goal.'

Gyz La Rivière on Malin TV

'For whom, then? For whom are those houses?' Three minutes into Malin TV, the 2023 film by artist Gyz La Rivière, we see him step out of a van. Microphone in hand, he positions himself in front of a construction hoarding bearing the image of a new-build development and the slogan The Next Great Chapter of Rotterdam. Before this moment, we have already seen: black-and-white footage of a Chinese circus, a shot of the Shanghai skyline, a reporter introducing Rotterdam's Chinatown, a quote from Confucius, and much more besides.

The images set the tone for the rest of the film, in which La Rivière uses an enormous archive of material to piece together an associative story about Rotterdam and China. A central figure in this story is Henk Sneevliet, a Rotterdam-born man who ended up in China in 1921 to help found the Communist Party.

'Two storylines had been running through my head for some time. The first is very widely felt: the housing shortage. You regularly hear figures in the news (hundreds of thousands of people in the Netherlands waiting for a home). That is a lot of people, but in China the scale is far greater. Could I link those stories? When the Chinese Communist Party turned 95, I discovered Henk Sneevliet. And when I started making this film, I thought: I need him to tell this story. Through him, I can take the viewer to vast China. That was the beginning.'

When making his films, La Rivière now works in a fixed way. Once an idea has taken shape, a research phase follows: reading books, gathering data, digging through archives. He then writes a script. 'It has an essay-like form and begins with text. But with every paragraph I also think: how would this look visually, what do I need to film?' The Creative Industries Fund NL awarded a startup grant for this research phase and the writing of the script. Two years later, a second grant followed for the realisation of the film.

La Rivière regards the film as the final part of a triptych, the first part of which is Rotterdam 2040, a personal film about Rotterdam and the future of the city. His second film, New Neapolis, about the port cities of Rotterdam, Liverpool, Naples, and Marseille, deals with Europe. The final part zooms out even further. 'You cannot take on the whole world, so I chose China, because who will be the most powerful this century? In principle, the films stand on their own, but for me personally they are deeply connected. All of them contain a great deal of Rotterdam.'

That is partly because the source material for the films is drawn primarily from Dutch archives, where La Rivière is now a regular presence. During the research phase, he spends days digging through all manner of databases. 'You can also search archives in China, which is enormously complicated, but you can also turn it around. For my film about four port cities, I looked at what we have in the Netherlands about those cities outside Rotterdam. And you come across an incredible amount of material that is just sitting there, and that nobody ever asks for.'

A recurring thread in Malin TV (named after Maring, Henk Sneevliet's alias) is archival footage from Dutch television about China: from old newsreels to more recent images. 'I watched virtually every newsreel featuring China. You see how the gaze towards the Far East has shifted over time. It is a particular kind of gaze, and you could make an entire film about that.

I have a great fondness for those old television news programmes with newsreaders sitting behind a desk with a little vase of flowers. I wanted to do something with that, partly to break up the voice-over. I had the idea of a broadcasting format fairly early on, and then it suddenly struck me: of course, it has to feel like a bulletin from a local broadcaster, the old Stads TV Rotterdam, now TV Rijnmond. That idea emerged gradually. It turned out to work very well in the edit, because the subjects are quite heavy, and this setup lightens things a little, brings some fun and a wink. That is my way.'

It is the madness of the world that I am trying to make sense of.

La Rivière works as an artist across many media, from books to neon light and from installations to films, and can therefore decide on a case-by-case basis what form best suits his story. The story of Malin TV lent itself particularly well to film, given the wealth of film and television footage La Rivière encountered. 'From the EYE collection there is a beautiful fragment of the Deliplein in Rotterdam in the snow. You see the Chinese community there, in the 1920s. Those images are so beautiful that you could easily watch three minutes of them without any text or explanation.'

In many of his films, La Rivière places seemingly random events in relation to one another and lets the viewer draw their own conclusions. 'That is my style as a filmmaker. It is the madness of the world that I am trying to make sense of. That is how information comes to me, and that is what I do with it.'

Stories, Storytellers, and Audiences

For all three makers, a fascination with a subject set the machinery in motion. But stories need not only tellers; they also require an audience. Thinking about that audience plays an important role in the making process of all three projects. For the makers of Platte Grond, it manifests in the rhythm of the podcast, and the silences that are deliberately created so that listeners can draw their own conclusions. Bystrykh creates an ambiguous relationship between image and audio, thereby leaving room for interpretation, while La Rivière maps out an associative path in Malin TV along which viewers can discover their own connections.

Malin TV premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) in 2023 and was shown the same year at, among other events, the Architecture Film Festival Rotterdam. The film will soon be available to stream via La Rivière's website. In doing so, he is aiming not only at the professional community but also at a broad cultural audience. By putting China forward as an example of how to address the housing crisis, while also keeping sight of the undemocratic processes that accompany such developments, the film challenges viewers to reflect on the Dutch situation from a new perspective. Great Pla/ns also functions as a discussion piece. The documentary has been screened at, among other venues, Pakhuis de Zwijger and at the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam and Festival Noorderzon in Groningen. Each screening was followed by a post-show discussion about regenerative practices and spatial renewal outside the city. In February 2024, Great Pla/ns was shown in the United States for the first time, as part of a conference on regenerative agriculture. Afterwards, Bystrykh spoke with a number of local farmers. In this way, the film also contributes to further strengthening the community of regenerative farmers of the Great Plains.

The makers of Platte Grond focus primarily on an online presence to build and retain their audience. The episodes have now been downloaded more than 200,000 times. Contributing to this has been the fact that leading podcasts such as VPRO DOCS and NPO Parelradio have broadcast several episodes, and that the series has received favourable reviews in publications including the VPRO Gids and Het Parool. From the outset, the makers have also invested heavily in communication and audience reach: a well-considered visual identity, a clean website, strong copy, and a presence on relevant social media platforms. Because, as initiator Michiel van Poelgeest believes, good stories will always find their way to their tellers. 'But it requires a well-considered strategy to then ensure those stories find their way to an audience.'

Sereh Mandias works as a lecturer and coordinator within the Interiors Buildings Cities chair (Faculty of Architecture, TU Delft) and as editor of De Dépendance, a platform for urban culture.