July 10th - Otterlo

It was a big hassle to get to the Kröller-Müller Museum, but it was worth it. While the museum had a breathtaking collection, I have had my fair share of Van Gogh’s and Picasso’s split between going to the Van Gogh Museum and the Yale Art Gallery—the art museum 15 minutes from my house. What was most engaging for me was riding a bike through De Hoge Veluwe National Park. Cycling has been one of the few sports that I have enjoyed through my life—it is like running but you get to sit. I love it for the places that it can take me and how fast you can go on a bike. While the bikes that were given to us for the ride through the national park were—by any definition of the word—fast, it was at least fun and every place I went, was beautiful in its desolation. The entire area felt so far removed from the general built environment that is tightly packed buildings with narrow streets in front, it felt stimulating in a completely different way. The mix of deforested areas and not made for quite an interesting scene to behold.

While the area was interesting, the bikes were interesting in a totally different way. They piqued my interest because of how they were utilized. I do not entirely know how the system worked, but it seemed as though because could just ride the bikes as they pleased as long as they were placed in designated areas. I absolutely love this idea to just allow people free access to bikes in a park of any scale. I think that it adds so much more nuance to the experience because you can cover so much more ground on a bike, and experiencing the park at the moderate speed a bike allows for is much different if you had to walk along the paths for tens of minutes before a change of scenery. On the bikes changes were evident within two minutes. What a simple but ingenious addition to the national park.

July 9th - The International Criminal Court

When I first checked the schedule for this study abroad program, the visit to the International Criminal Court piqued my interest the most, purely based on the fact that it sounded cool. I obviously knew about the ICC beforehand but did not know exactly what it did and how it worked. Arriving at the location of the headquarters of the ICC, I was surprised about general design of the entire location. In my head, I pictured a something akin to the United States Supreme Court building—neoclassical in nature. However, it looked very modern, it seemed like a campus Apple would place their new headquarters in. It looked like anything but a court.

Getting into the place felt like getting into a different country—technically not too far from the truth. The security that I saw was so stringent and high tech. To get anywhere but the lobby of the main building, you needed a keycard and biometric authentication. It was crazy but also made so much sense to me the level of security just get from one hallway to another. While I was near the cafe waiting, I noticed a stretch of about 20 feet where a worker would need to authenticate their identity four separate times if they wanted to walk from an office-like area to some kind of lounge area. I knew this place was serious business before, but just observing for ten minutes, it became very self evident.

Being able to sit in on the pretrial for a war criminal was a surreal experience to say the least. Personally, I found the listing of his charges to be so interesting even when I had to filter through the legalease in both English and French to be able to understand what the prosecutors were saying. I have always been fascinated by the legal process and how powerful oral argument can be. One of the prosecutors used thousands upon thousands of words to say that the tribunal set up by the group of which the defendant was the leader was not legally valid nor legal, which means that the rulings that the group gave out were illegal. The big thing that I found the most interesting while watching the pretrial was how many of the lawyers were women and—more generally—how young many of them looked. It is so amazing to see people who looked so young to have such a large part in deciding the fate of a man so much older and someone who probably committed such terrible crimes. Obviously, the judges were much older and they are the final authority on whether or not the case goes to trial, but their opinions are influenced by the oral arguments and evidence laid out by the prosecution and defense. It is incredible that these people can craft such statements in two languages that probably may have not been their first or even second languages. The depth of knowledge that these lawyers must have has to be astonishing.

At first I was surprised that the ICC even had a library, but as I thought about where the lawyers at the pretrial got their information, it made total sense that there was one. It was really cool to see the collection and learn more about the logistics of library that is not meant for public consumption—especially one whose patrons are of such a specialized field. I liked the fact that since they are technically in international territory, copyright laws do not really apply to them, and the drawbacks and advantages that had on digitizing their collection, among other things. There are so many variables to take into account when running such a unique library, I have a hard time totally comprehending the many intricacies of the entire situation, and how they can have an inter-library loan system for a library in such a secure area. I know I learned a lot today.

July 5th - Efteling

Going to Efteling was the most trip so far. Sorry to all the museums and libraries but an amusement park is a little more fun. I think that Efteling was such a positive experience for me because of how well kept the grounds were, I do not know whether due to the fact that the park was not that large compared with the likes of Disneyworld, but just being able to walk around a clean area was good. However, not all of Efteling was good. The attraction that stood out the most to me was the journey through the forbidden city, an It's a Small World-esque ride, but nowhere near as cheerful. I understand that the whole point of the entire section that this ride is in is supposed to be a walk into a fantasy version of a place with a similar vibe as Arab/Middle Eastern culture, which in it of itself is weird at best in a country that is so overwhelmingly white. There were a multitude of factors that led to me feeling quite uncomfortable on the ride, chief among them was the poor animatronics of many of many of the figures throughout the ride. They were smack dab at the lowest point in the uncanny valley for realism. It also did not help that we did not speak any Dutch to fully understand the point of the ride because the entire ride made very little sense. This ride stuck out to me the most because I felt like it had little to do with the overall theme of the park—other than the fact there was a wizard in the ride. I felt the most confused at the end of the ride because it ended with us going through the legs a large caricature of a figure wearing only a loincloth. It felt offensive on so many levels.

The rest of my time at Efteling, however, was splendid. I have been on a rollercoaster for about two years so I was excited to go on all of them. Most of the attractions seemed tailored for kids so none of the roller coasters were too intense for me at least. The most innovative part of the entire experience was the app that was advertised to download on your phone. It displayed wait times for rides and walking times to the next ride, which were infinitely useful in planning out the day to maximize fun and minimize waiting around. The amusement park had a certain aura of positive which made me forget about a lot of things and stress, if only for a short while. I think that is what amusement parks are all about, letting go of daily stresses to just have fun. Efteling accomplished this goal to a tee, and while there were certainly things they could improve upon at the park, I would still love to go back some time.

July 3rd - Het Nieuwe Instituut

Het Nieuwe Instituut was a weird place all around. Entering the front door, I was confused to say the least. In the antechamber between the front door and the lobby, there were plastic bins full of soil and gardening materials were strewn about on metal shelves. I thought we wound up in another food forest type situation. However, the lobby and the general construction of the building did not lend itself to a greenhouse or any kind of place to grow plants. It was not until the presentation we had in the conference room did I actually understand what Het Nieuwe Instituut was about. The concept of the institution I absolutely love—to take an artistic perspective on modern day issues/topics. Their For the Record project, where its purpose is to deconstruct certain pieces of popular culture, like the music video to APESHIT by Jay-Z and Beyoncé, felt like a fresh take on the well established video essay. I also really enjoyed their Burn Out project because it is such a broad topic and felt that they could go just about anywhere with burn out as their main focus. Applying the idea of burn out to global man made climate change was really interesting because it places the onus on the viewer to confront climate change in a different manner, and I found out what the dirt was about. Art has so much value in so many aspects, I especially love the use of it at Het Nieuwe Instituut because instead of exhibiting art solely based on its aesthetic value, they use art as a medium for change in a non pretentious way. A novel idea for many.

July 2nd - Utrecht

The trip to Utrecht was one of the more interesting trips of the week, if not only for the fact that I was about one of the most important urban issues that we face today—homelessness. The guest lecturer, Nienke Boesveldt, seemed very interested in trying to understand the roots of homelessness and how to fix it. However, I felt that she lectured like an academic. I am not saying that that is necessarily a bad thing in principle, but it made it difficult to stay engaged with the presentation. I understand that when someone gets so specialized into a certain field it can be hard to not get into the minutiae of their research. However, it interrupts the flow of information. Overall though, the lecture was informative and interesting.

There seems to be a stark difference between the people who become homeless in the United States versus the Netherlands. After going to the Salvation Army, and listening to Boesveldt’s lecture, it seems as though the primary group that becomes homeless in the Netherlands are migrants who could not find work soon after arriving in the country. This contrasts with the demographic of the homeless in the United States in the sense that many of the homeless were well established within their own community in the sense that they had some kind of income already and rent just got too high and were forced to leave their homes. While I am sure there are also homeless people in the United States that recently migrated to the country and are homeless because they could not find any opportunities, from the two things we did for the day, it seems that in the Netherlands, the majority of homeless people are migrants from countries that are dangerous to live in or entrenched in political turmoil. The Salvation Army said that the main groups are Eastern Europeans and migrants.

I found it quite amazing that Boesveldt found that very few people get evicted from their homes in the Netherlands because in the United States, it seems like—for many regular people—there is always this looming fear that stems from them trying to figure how to make rent. That psyche seems to be ingrained into popular culture. That was what stuck out to me the most. I know very little about homelessness in the United States, let alone the Netherlands so what I have said may not be true but that is the general sense that I get from using social media and interacting with popular culture. I think that it seems similar to just how American the idea of the television show Breaking Bad is because in most European countries the cost of healthcare is very low, so it would make little sense that a chemistry teacher with cancer would need to turn to making methamphetamine to pay for his treatment and support his family.

June 29th-30th - The Weekend

Over the weekend, I tried to utilize my I AMsterdam Card as much as possible. Because of this, I was able to observe and explore Amsterdam more and better. First on the itinerary was MOCO—The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. On display was mainly works by Banksy—their main attraction. I found it quite amazing—both the art and the museum itself—and not with a totally positive connotation.

When I first got to Amsterdam, I immediately saw the posters for MOCO, and how they had a large collection of Banksy’s work on display. My initial thought was about the irony of displaying pieces by Banksy in a museum setting, it made little sense to me, and there was no way that Banksy actually approved the museum to show his work. This suspicion was confirmed when I arrived at MOCO because all of the pieces there were either taken from their original locations or on loan to the museum from private collections, None of the art was given to the museum by Banksy for the purpose of being displayed. I was glad to be able to see Banky’s work up close by I found the entire experience to be weird because you have to play to get into the museum even with my I AMsterdam Card. The whole thing seemed antithetical to Banky’s anti-capitalist rhetoric.

When I first got interested in fine art, I was perplexed as to how or why some pieces sold for so much money and it seemed to me that the price tag of a piece equated to how good the work was. I had hopped aboard the thought train that some many ride with—that the art itself and the art market were the same, which is completely wrong. Art and the art market have little to do with one another other than the fact that the art has a value. In the art market, that value is monetary, while the value of the art itself is intangible—it is what the viewer perceives is its value. I think that artists such as Banksy, are trying to fight back against the art market with his messages in his art. One such stunt that stood out to me was when his painting of a girl with a red, heart-shaped balloon sold at auction and then got shredded as soon as the gavel fell. While the plan did backfire because the piece got even more expensive afterwards, I can appreciate it for the message Banksy was trying to convey, no matter the ridiculous price tag. People should appreciate the art, not its price.

Saturday was the Rijksmuseum and I had one goal there—to see Night Watch by Rembrandt van Rijn. Everything else was secondary. Walking into the RIjksmuseum, it felt like your classic large art museum, complete with a grand foyer. Having been to places such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, I was expecting a similar layout, obviously, the Rijksmuseum overwhelmingly contains pieces by Dutch artists, I felt that pieces were going to displayed in chronological order and a simple to follow path from the earliest pieces to most recent would be a logical thought. While I was right about the order, I was totally wrong about  the floor plan because it made no intuitive sense to me. It was extremely hard to get from one side of the museum to the other without either going the wrong way or back tracking. The Rijksmusem needs to hire an experience architect because the walkthrough of the museum left something to be desired.

Many of the works were amazing, as expected from a collection on the caliber of the Rijksmuseum. However, what stood out the most to me was not the art on display, rather, what they had planned for Night Watch; to do a public restoration of it. I was amazed due to the fact that I have never heard of such a thing being done before for any painting—let alone one of the most famous of all time. I love the idea because it involves the museum goers in a process of museum upkeep that nobody usually gets to see. Getting visitors of the museum emotionally invested into the success of the restoration will get visitors to comeback and see the progress or at the very least keep up with it in some capacity. The only drawback I see is if the restoration goes wrong in some way because it would be extremely hard to hide the fact that there was a mistake if it was obvious enough, but I think that situation is unlikely. I would love to see more museums do public restorations of famous pieces.

June 28th - Amsterdam Street Art Museum

Our site visit today was for the Amsterdam Street Art Museum. Going into this site visit, I did not really know what to expect because the title of the museum sounds oxymoronic—how can you have a museum about street art? When we made it there and the tour guide explained where the collection was, it made a lot more sense. Graffiti and street art—to me at least—has always seemed to be about going against the grain and how impermanent things can be. Graffiti tags on walls can be covered up in a matter of days but people still do it anyways. The form has evolved from the simple tagging up of a neighborhood to claim a type of “ownership” to genre defying pieces of art from the likes of Jean-Michel Basquiat and powerful political statements such as those of Banksy. I have always loved the impermanence of street art 

I found the museum's goal to attract more people to the outer areas of Amsterdam to be admirable, but they do seem to fall a little flat in practice. While many of the pieces they had in their collection were very well done and quite beautiful to say the least, I found much of the situation they were in to be somewhat problematic. Even if they were not intending for this, it sure looks like the reason that they can have so many of the street artists do art around the neighborhood is because the place is home to many lower income households, making it cheaper to approve spaces for public murals, so it seems like they are taking advantage of the situation to further their own agenda. However, I do not know whether that is a good or bad thing because their goals has good intentions behind it, but since I am just a tourist, I am not fully aware of every aspect of the situation they have at hand. Dispersing tourist throughout the entirety of Amsterdam may alleviate many of the problems that they face now in the city center, but they outer rings of the city may not want tourists walking about their communities—but I do not know the general sentiment. Looking at this as an outsider, there seems to be too many variables at play to give a definitive answer on whether or not the museum is hurting or helping the community—in the short and long term.

The collection itself is quite amazing, the museum did not want to skimp on hiring talented artists to build its collection. When the tour guide was asked how the museum was trying to preserve these pieces, his response pointed to the museum not having the resources to and/or not trying to preserve these pieces. I found that to be fascinating because that is so far removed from the mass conservation efforts a traditional art museum to keep all their masterpieces as pristine as possible. That point of view resonates so well with the very core of street art—it was never supposed to last forever—now at the museum, many of the pieces are only going to last for five years. That is what I love about street art and the Street Art Museum, the impermanence of it all is so beautiful and striking for me. While the museum is by no means perfect, I can respect what they believe in.

June 27th - Van Gogh Museum

Vincent Van Gogh is my favorite visual artist of all-time. His use of color and heavy brushwork is unparalleled and should have the same reputation as the old masters of the craft. Needless to say, I was excited to go to the Van Gogh Museum. Getting to the museum, I was itching to go in and look at all the pieces within for hours. However, the presentations beforehand about their initiatives for seeing-impaired people and migrant background people were probably the most compelling part of the entire trip. 

When 3D printing was first starting to gain commercial affordability, I thought about all of the things that I would want to print out if I had one, and this around the same time I started to get into the art world and appreciating art for the cultural importance that it has. Ever since learning about how thickly Van Gogh applied paint to his art, I have always wondered what it would feel like to run my hand across one of his paintings. So when 3D printing started to be commercially viable, I felt that the days until I was able to touch a Van Gogh were dwindling. That day finally happened when I went to the Van Gogh Museum and I was over the moon. I never even thought about the possible use case of 3D replicas of paintings for the blind and partially-sighted community. That is what is so amazing about humans, we can look at emerging technologies and come up with a plethora of adjacent use cases for the technology—many times not even close to what it was originally designed for.

June 26th - Tropenmuseum and OBA

On the outside, the Tropenmuseum is ornate in construction and looks like any other anthropological museum—unassuming in nature. Even the interior screams quintessential museum. What I found extraordinary was the content and collections that were on display because many of the pieces in the museum were not usual museum items. While the Tropenmuseum did have things like colonial art and artifacts plundered from the Netherlands’ colonies, they also had a body pillow in the section about Japan, which was unexpected to say the least. 

I liked the concept of what the Tropenmuseum wanted to strive for, but I think that it fell flat in its execution. It was quite jarring to go from the flashiness and gaudiness of the Cool Japan exhibit to the conservative and muted setting for the Mecca exhibit. It made very little sense to me that these two exhibits should be put anywhere close to one another because their goals seem completely different. The Cool Japan exhibit wanted to show off the things that the international community liked about Japan and the phenomenon that has taken over the minds of many all over the world to get them so interested in Japan in the first place. On the other hand, the exhibit on the Hajj and Mecca wanted to highlight to people what a profound and important process that the Hajj is for Muslims. I cannot say for sure but—to me—it seems insensitive to put an exhibit about cool things from Japan where everything is a little over the top next to an exhibit about the most important spiritual and physical journey a Muslim can experience.

The Tropenmuseum is innovative because it had to have a large paradigmatic shift after it was no longer a museum for the Netherlands’ colonial conquests. It had to rebrand while still only having the colonial artifacts that Dutch colonials stole from native lands.

The other site visit we had today was to OBA, Amsterdam Public Library. Coming from a place with little knowledge about library sector, I knew not what to expect. Walking through its large, revolving door, I was impressed with not just the size of the library but also by the amount of noise I could hear coming from inside. I think that it has been ingrained in us since children that libraries are supposed to be quiet spaces. I guess that shows just how long I have not stepped foot into a public library.

The presentation about the online aspect of the library was the most interesting to me because when I think about a library, a strong online presence does not come to mind. I like how they were evolving their website to a more modern look and appealing to certain demographics with a redesign of its layout (children, elderly, etc.). After the presentations it made so much more sense to me that public libraries are not only about providing somewhere to get books, it's about creating a safe space for anyone to do work or just about anything while also offering a plethora of media to check out. 

There were things that were surprising for me to see at the library at first but made so much sense after giving it some thought, such as the food court area. In my mind, the library boils down to be a place of learning for everyone, not just students at a school, and learning is very difficult without first fulfilling basic needs like hunger. Everything at OBA all contributed to a richer place for productivity and learning for anyone. I think that is the real innovation for OBA.

The Tropenmuseum

June 25th - Food Forest

Innovation—for me—is a substantial act in which a problem is solved through a novel process or the novel application of an existing process. I think that the edible food forest is a great innovation for urban areas. Taking the multiple millennia old idea of augmenting a plot of land to allow for the sustainable germination of edible plants and applying it to small areas for urban communities to cultivate not only food but also a closer community. I have experienced first hand the bleak nature of a city overrun by a concrete jungle and it is not pleasant. Going back to basics—in my mind—sounds like a financially sound and environmentally friendly method way to bring back much needed greenery to urban areas. As well as making the landscape of these neighborhoods more natural, it also creates a place within the community for collaboration and general community building because there is now a need for people to harvest, plant, and do general upkeep of the food forest.