THE STREET AS A FORUM FOR DEMOCRACY

Jeroen Jongeleen

With his project ‘The Street as a Form for Democracy‘, Jeroen Jongeleen seeks to add an additional layer of meaning onto the skin of the Utrecht outdoors. He collects fragments of text from various long-read news sources that he encounters during his daily morning readings on his smartphone. These fragments address the big and darker topics that dominate today’s headlines.

The articles from which they are drawn deal with subjects such as: populism’s explosive political rise, corruption, the melting polar ice caps and their consequences, pervasive pollution, ongoing wars that batter the people, the expanding surveillance state and its impact on us, and other threats knocking at our door. All of these news topics serve as potential sources from which Jongeleen plucks his sentences.

Once removed from their original context, these handwritten textual fragments become both poetic expressions and footnotes, guiding the passerby back to their source articles by entering them into a Google search on their smartphones.

Jeroen Jongeleen

― Kunstenaar

The work of Dutch artist Jeroen Jongeleen is characterized by a distinct stance of dissensus: one that opposes both the superficiality of urban design and the increasing colonization of the street. In a practice that engages with images and public space in a militantly active way, he employes numerous methods and materials – including stickers, plastic bags, spray paints and even the human body itself – in an effort to enliven the banality and sterility of the modern city. Championing a more liberated public sphere and critiquing the over-regulation of both the city and art, Jongeleen's understated but always ingenious urban interventions are heavily influenced by the avant-garde art movements of the last century. He describes his motivation to create art as not about 'decoration or making people happy, but about free speech and movement, about opposition as the essence of a truly democratic society'. His politically motivated work therefor sets out to illustrate the power and the dynamics of the street, while offering an utopian vision for the future.

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