Below is a set of creative writing samples from Chengfan Zhao. His creative writing scope covers architecture, urbanism, gender studies and performance arts.︎︎︎

Stad in de Maak:
A normadic victory outside the market
( 城市营造:追求社会主义的资产阶级创新 )

Written by : Chengfan Zhao, Zhongjing Zhang
PDF reading version click here︎︎︎

We were in the middle of Pieter de Raadstraat, alongside a building that would cost five minutes to walk from the Rotterdam Central Station. This wooden frame house came with a door that was painted in emerald. Above the middle entrance, letters arranged themselves into three lines: "STAD/ IN DE/ MAAK". They humbly stood there ever since 2013. We knocked on the door under those letters, and no one answered. After we anxiously twisted the handle, the door softly opened itself as if giggled. Rude and unexpected as it seemed to be, we climbed all the way up to the attic, where a generous sunset shed its color into the dusty and empty rooms, the plain wooden floor suddenly turned into chrome yellow. A sense of vibrating fertility stemmed from the light in this empty room, echoed with the letters we saw at the entrance "city in the making".

Knowing the Stad in de Maak project was a coincidence in the autumn of 2019 ︎︎︎(1). Erik gave an excursion to Pension Almonde (part of the project, which is closed now) to those who met there for celebrating public spaces. With a roll of colorful hand-drawing elevation of the Almonde project, Erik presented the idea of the project with its realization in the background. And the stories of how they saved the life of these abandoned houses from the turbulent housing market, with their future reassembled.

The Stad in de Maak project was tested in several sites, lasting from two to ten years, with groups of tenants generating diverse community programs. Beyond the rich information on their website, we visited two sites and luckily had Erik for a further conversation. Besides our understanding of this project as an attempt under the lasting housing crisis in the Netherlands, we raised a couple of questions in mind. Why do we need to pull real estate outside the market? How could we pull it out? How to select the residents? What does the interaction inside the buildings and neighborhoods look like? How to regulate such a community?
            

Real estate found its own legacy inside the protection of capitalism. The free market enabled a great transformation of the fundamental definition of necessities in our life. A span of one century witnessed the soaring construction sites reinterpreting modernity in our contemporary societies. The skyscrapers stemmed from the ground desperately trying to escape from the gravity, along with the real estate price flooded out. Houses became commodities, and we took them for granted.

Apparently, the rising housing price creates a rather obvious inequality, where the right to housing is being expelled by the economic status, leaving only the wealthy being capable of enjoying the needs to be sheltered. For those not capable of affording to purchase real estate, rental became another option. However, invisible equality was hidden behind each property and its rental fee. Gender, race, educational background, social networks, all play certain tricks in rental markets, though euphemistically. So now, standing in the middle of the housing crisis, shall we pull the house out of the market to solve the issue? Naive as it sounds, they have been practicing for eight years ︎︎︎(2). How do they make it happen?

Funding
Derived from the German model - Mietshäuser Syndikat (MHS), Stad in de Maak attempts to run itself sustainably by recycling funds: rent, social funding, immaterial compensation, etc. To start the project, the organization first restored abandoned or vacant social housing for a certain period, and then recollected funds by renting out houses. The rental price is usually stable and much lower than the one in the market, it remained around 200-350 euro per month, with the energy fee being excluded now. Stad in de Maak started with a contract for 10 years, a long- term contract might face the risk of building maintenance and tenant vetting in the future. To make the overall Stad in de Maak project more feasible, housing projects/experiments now are mostly focused on short- term contracts, from two years or even less. Even though these houses are often destined to be either demolished or rebuilt in the future. Stad in de Maak and tenants still try to take care of those buildings as much as they can, both in case of duration and devotion.

We might cast doubt, what if the received rents fail to cover the income and expenditures of the current projects, and then financial shortage could emerge? The truth is, on the other hand, these houses rely on social and government funding. Thus instead of increasing rents, they could still maintain their own balance. What is even more bizarre to the monetary mindset is the encouragement of immaterial compensation, for example, carpenters create furniture for the building, in return, they would receive one year rent-free.

Association
To help the project grow from a temporary initiative into a permanent housing landscape in the country, Stad in de Maak helps to promote the initiation of a bigger housing cooperative to make the housing projects connected with one another. Inspired by the German MHS business model, Stad in de Maak participated in establishing the Vrijcoop association ︎︎︎(3) in the Netherlands. Although the project is only based in Rotterdam now, Vrijcoop cooperates with other social organizations inother cities such as Amsterdam. The association wants to provide tenants and residents of social housing with opportunities for decision-making and management of their own housing-related issues.

What remains unchanged is that Stad in de Maak is only the advisor that never owns a house. Just like the opening project of Pieter de Raadstraat on the street where Mark and Erik lived at the beginning, their work is only to provide advice and assistance, organization and funding, design and redevelopment. The actual system is often half equally owned by users and the national flag of groups. Erik told us that the organization is also considering establishing new banking systems, and working together with ethic banks in Belgrade, to make it clear to tenants about their funds recycling with sustainable businesses and development.

It turns out that Stad in the Maak receives overwhelming applications from the beginning. At first, they selected people based on their feelings. Creative people like architects, designers, and artists are welcomed. Then they offered the residents inside the buildings to make decisions themselves since they would be the ones meeting the new neighbors on a daily basis. There were some exciting changes in the biggest project Pension Almonde. ︎︎︎(4) Erik and his friends tried to create a more inclusive street in the limited two years. All groups of people were involved in this project, from creatives to hippies, from expats, drunk people to women groups, from young to old, etc.

The changing notion of ownership (transaction) reflected itself on three major facets (interaction), shared spaces possibilities, responsibilities for the vicinity and communication in decision-making.

Public spaces remain a rather prioritized domain in Stad in de Maak. Erik came up with the other founders that the ground floor will not be leased, instead, it served as a shared space for the imagination of public activities. So far, the Pieter de Raadstraat has witnessed various activities held day and night ︎︎︎(5). The appearance of neighbors and the tenants living inside the building re-enchanted a rather strange notion of closeness for people living outside the project.

The ground floor activities were organized based on local initiatives. The ongoing project Neverland cinema ︎︎︎(6) created a social space for the neighbor and the tenants to engage with one another through the means of moving pictures.

A shared laundry was open just around the corner, where the conversation could flow along with the garment spinning inside the washer. ︎︎︎(7)

A social kitchen is structured for those who envision a space where they cook and share the meal with a group of friends. ︎︎︎(8)

5 (left)Screenshot of Slopera project in Pension Almond during the Rotterdam Opera festival, 2021

6 Space used for Neverland Cinema

7 8m2 Laundrette Wasbuur overview

Social interaction was shared in the public spaces, so are the responsibilities. This shared notion of responsibility leads to sociocracy for regulating the community. The buildings have a board in charge of the decision-making process, the surplus from the rental fee and the government funding keeps the decision running.

Erik described sociocracy as social credit governance typically in their boarding house. The case of Pension Almonde could typically illustrate the function and position of the boarding house in regulating the wellbeing of the neighborhood. Given the fact that Pension Almonde was a rather massive project: 52 units of housing were located inside, thus tracking the mechanism inside this project made the existence of the boarding house even more crucial.

A typical illustration could be traced back to the first outbreak of the COVID -19 pandemic as the fear over the pandemic spreading inside the compound. Residents complained about a group of neighbors not following the 1.5 social distance rule and appeared in a cluster from time to time on the street. The boarding house investigated the case and found out this group of tenants was actually a group living together as a “wolf pack”. Precarious as they seemed to be, their appearance on the street was actually an illusion of their disobedience to the COVID regulation. The boarding house revealed the fact that this group was well aware of the COVID regulation. They took very careful consideration in social interaction that they only socialized with people inside this pack, which turned out sometimes they are way too close on the street.

Through such an explanation, the fear and panic were gradually eased inside the building. The boarding house had multiple online interviews with the residents to help understand the separation and isolation of the community at the beginning of the pandemic. The boarding house revisited the situation every two weeks by listening to residents from different national backgrounds. In this process, they also realized the COVID information discrepancy from country to country. By distributingthose information inside the community, they help to alleviate the pain caused by this merciless pandemic. Later, the boarding house decided to spend 1000 euros on distributing the soaps and cleaning necessities in making this community even safer. As Erik said,

In the end

Stad in de Maak is a project with a humanity touch. It questioned the legitimacy of the monetary attribute of the housing and transformed it into something emotional. It sheltered those people who were excluded in the market by default. It created its own wonderland through the trust of the people and a collaborative self-governed model.

When we revisited the Pension Almonde project, the track of the living had been erased. The vertical building rests horizontally in peace. We stood on the opposite side of the building, with this emptiness in front of us still striking our imagination, for the ongoing “city in the making”. Through the bricks, we saw a group of Rotterdammers dreamed along with what John Lennon hummed in “Imagine”. They stood together inside 4 buildings (currently) in this 324.1 square kilometers' land, Netherland’s second-largest city, Rotterdam. We heard them sing, sing a precious, luxurious yet fundamental dream: imagine there is no real estate market.

This is City in the making: a nomadic victory outside the market.

Netherlands Local Initiative Introduction

Two years ago, when I first came to the Netherlands, the feeling of isolation confused me. Renowned for its liberated attitude towards sexuality, drug policy, and English proficiency, the country assembled an imagined utopian definition of the freedom of self-actualization. However, two years ago, when I saw myself standing in the middle of Rotterdam, a scary sense of isolation suffocated me. My Dutch classmates usually teamed up with people who can also communicate in Dutch; street flyers have nothing to do with me as I am literally illiterate; racism that I encountered on the street and inside the classroom. Thus a sense of belonging evaporated at a rather fast speed. Where do I belong? How can I actualize myself when I am completely dispelled from the context? Those are the questions I cannot and dare not answer by then.

Two years later, as I entered the Dutch border again amid a pandemic, I started to force myself to research people’s fantasy and addiction to the Netherlands, specifically Rotterdam. The city looks rather plain to me. It is small enough to be called a district in Shanghai. Meanwhile, big enough to be self-acclaimed as a truly metropolitan where over 150 nationalities live inside the city (I never heard New York stated itself as a metropolis by using the statistics of its residents’ passport typology). Nevertheless, as I delved deeper into numerous randomly organized interviews with my friends, I started to develop a major theme they used when they described Rotterdam, “cool people”.

Surely enough, cool people mostly do not live in coolsingel, but they have their footprint across the city. I started to research what those “cool people” are really doing, which made this city lure youngster from migrating here across the Netherlands. From that point, I found out another interesting theme through the constructivist grounded approach, “the local initiative”.

From squatting to urban farming, from bike repair stores to queer self-help groups, as my research delved deeper, I realized that besides over 150 nationalities living inside this city, Rotterdam has some unique characteristics. For me, those local initiatives not only serve for their specific functionalities but also create a perfect excuse for people to unite and intertwine with each other in this highly individualized society (I even sometimes refer to it as a crisis of individualism).

Looking back two years ago, I reflect on the question again: “Where do I belong? How can I actualize myself when I am completely dispelled from the context?”. I think those local initiatives might create a solution and hope for those lonely souls strangled in this city, begging for the winter rain and wind to not ceaselessly erode every inch of its leftover optimistic personality. Sadly, most of the initiatives still have a large language barrier for people to participate and even have informational access (since English is not widely accessible in the published content).

Thus I created this initiative, writing in English and Chinese, to record the Netherlands’ local initiative. Serve as a digital archive for myself, but also for those lonely souls. Hope you can find your way home.

The content will be later published on the website localinitiative.nl, possibly in a physical zine.

Thank you very much for reading. If you have any thoughts or recommendations for the people I can interview with, feel free to connect anywhere on social media or send an email to talk@zhaochengfan.com.

Uchronia: when contemporary art met hanging dick in the theatre.

Art of performing weeks poster encounter while cycling

He was wearing a shiny yellow jockstrap, with a Pokémon tattooed on the right leg. Chansey (the Pokémon) showed her naïve imagination at the peak of his wrapped and tight genital. His hand was pushed to the ground, he tilted, the hair on the chest became a blatant show-off. Within a glance, he looked at you directly and thirstily, in silence. He was murmuring at you in a rather nuanced volume. Apparently, you cannot resist, either by the deep blue color or the seductive manner of that gesture, or you are just a super Pokémon fan like I am. Then you stopped while cycling under the railway bridge, reading the text “feeling curious”.

You were hooked, and then you started to get confused. What was this performing art about? Who was this guy? Why was he publicly in that flirtatious yellow jockstrap which never left my wardrobe? What was his message? How was he going to present himself on the stage?

Before I got overwhelmed with all those question marks, I found my way out by arriving five minutes before the show started in Theatre Rotterdam. No one told me that in the next 70 minutes, I was going to witness an almost naked performance. The genital could make their glamorous feministic pride out, the manifesto statement would be sent out in songs, the dancer would put their barefoot on the glass pieces to articulate their hallucination. It was all just like the website stated

“The title literally means ‘no time’, related to the concept of utopia: ‘no place’. In Uchronia, Vincent traces the origins of dance and of humanity itself, and then invents new scenarios for the existing stories of creation.”

The performance was being fragmented into diasporic pieces, each transcended the definition of time and space. The artists on stage were more in a carnival, celebrating the disappeared norm in our daily lives and replacing it with the celebration that could possibly only be present in this 50 square meters stage. The play started with a monologue where the performer was structuring himself in a hospital room. The monologue was woven with manic expression, later intertwined with the fantasy of sexual arousal and contemporary dance. Unfortunately, a concrete storyline would no longer be possible to trace as the concept of Uchronia dispel the chronological narratives.

Confusion stranded me along with the show. This celebration never ended, as if it was the moving feast portrayed in Henri Matisse’s La Danse. Loud as the celebration sounds, the visual language and vocal line forced you to think about the underlying message they were trying to convey. What was the connection between the line “my loneliness is killing me” and the performers’ masturbation on the stage, along with the attack of cramp? What was the relationship between “Everybody has got their own body” and “I am binary but everyone thinks I am cis”? Or maybe there was simply no meaning. The presentation of the hedonistic nature of humanity was the purpose itself.

For me, the show seemed more like an overwhelmed sense of liberation. It liberated the restriction of the performing format, from dance, vocal to acrobatics. It liberated the costume on the stage. The use of erotic dress enabled the free flow of the penis, the vibrating glute, the dazzling nipple decorated on the breast and the outrage of the virginal growing like the baby bamboo rushing out from the ground. My mouth was opened, thus released the inner shock.

Sitting in the center of the Rotterdam, the building was decorated through the public fund. Thus watching the play processed erotically in the theatre Rotterdam was almost like office sex in the play. The message was clear, break the wall, break the structure, show up the genital and fuck the rule.

When the show ended, I stayed still in my seat for another five minutes. People were leaving the chair, but I was lost in my own interpretation and translation. The artists made cotton candy and distributed them to the audience. It looked so soft, like a remote fantasy. When you have a bite, it melted immediately, left the sweet enchantment, just like the show itself.

I walked outside the theatre with that sense of confusion. So what was the purpose? Or there was simply no purpose at all? Then I randomly talked with two audiences who also just left the show and expressed my sincere feeling toward the performance.

“How long have you stayed in the Netherlands?”

“Two months this time.”

“Well, if you stay longer, then you will understand. It is just a way of free expression.”

Maybe they were right. It was just a way of free expression. When contemporary art encounters a hanging dick in the theatre, who cares about the meaning?

60 sets of hanging boobies, 60 individualistic dreams

            

Poster designed by Laura & Raven

Itwas a cozy Saturday night, I dropped by my friends’ place for a home cook dinner. We were having a sweet collection of pumpkin, potato, long bean, shimeji mushroom, and egg tofu soaked in the aromatic Japanese curry. While having those creamy and tasty ingredients in our mouths, my friend Raven came up with something that spiced up the conversation.

“Are you interested in exhibitions?”

“Yes.”

“My roommate and I did a project. We used an analog camera to shoot 60 boobies, and we are going to curate them next Friday in our place. Wanna join?”

The image of over 60 titties flashed in my mind all of a sudden. Unconsciously they stirred up the food both in my plate and palate. I swallowed the remaining umami with a rather plain answer.

“Sure”.

The boobies started their journey in this eighty square meters apartment where the bustling Witte de With Straat accompanied the generation of wild imagination. Laura, Raven’s roommate by contract, found a beautiful self-portrait picture of her boobies. While she was carefully examining the beatitude of her breast, a question suddenly jumped into her mind, “Why do I rarely see boobies openly show themselves off in our society?”. This pair of pendulous breasts could not answer, but Laura quickly turned into Raven for confirmation. Surprisingly, Raven returned her with an equivalently naked breast picture. “We should let more people have the chance to show their titties.” And so it was, the journey of hunting, photographing, nudging, listening and curating, all started from here, this eighty-square-meters apartment and two naked breast pictures.

On 17 December, I was standing in front of over 60 sets of boobies somewhere near Witte de With Straat. Witnessing those silenced breasts hanging on the wall, articulating their attitude and speech towards structured gender norms. I was watching the audacity of those people in the shot peeling off clothes as if from the societal gaze. Their scars, smiles, confidence, and hesitations echoed with 60 sets of shining individualistic dreams.

The dream came awake on a casual Friday night, where you saw young college students hang out with their friends who shared a similar pattern of the dress: neat and wide trousers, dark sweaters, loose coats, which all unconsciously shaped their liberated casualness identity. You saw these groups take off from cars, bikes and scooters, ring the bell and then squeeze themselves into this wooden door situated on the ground floor. Then they headed upstairs to this underground exhibition where you could see posters of breasts shaking themselves off along the corridor. When you finally climbed up to the top floor, you would find Laura and Raven standing there, in front of the entrance of their hidden palace. They constantly greeted and hugged friends and strangers. At that moment, you realized the exhibition was not only about titties. By means of titties, they found a perfect way to party, communicate, socialize, and connect. Once you had finalized your contribution to the exhibition, Laura would use a titties-sticker to temporality seal the sight of your phone camera. After all, this event was only available to biological human eyes to protect the already vulnerable human titties.

The curation was divided into four main rooms. The largest living room, two small bedrooms where Laura and Raven resided, and a corridor connected them all. The photography colonized all the walls and doors without description. Only the pictures themselves murmuring the stories. If you walk inside those two hosts’ bedrooms, those two beds remind you of all the mundane events you would have in your personal daily life. They were supposed to be secret, closed, and protected. Now they opened their door to the friends and strangers, with dangling boobies on the walls expressing their ambitious yet caring point of view. The crowds, the beds, the alcohol, the boobies on the wall, they sewed the dynamic of their own. It all reminded me of the moment in 1969 in Amsterdam, when John Lennon and Yoko Ono struck the world with Bed-ins for the peace movement. Instead of putting “HAIR PEACE” and “BED PEACE” on the window, Raven and Laura carefully curated the pictures made on their own. Friends at this time are no longer singing “Give Peace A Chance”; instead, they are sitting and standing comfortably around the analog photos. The sounds of sipping wine, chatting, laughing created a new song for “Give Titties A Chance”.

Looking through all the photos, you would find they were topless figures with the head cropped out. At that time, the solid reason behind such a decision remained unclear to me, but they provided a chance to protect the privacy of each participant. Besides, it created a focus for the theme of the collection, the breast and the nipples, without the disruption of the human faces intensifying the bias that already existed in our minds. It also helped the imagination flow. You would start to investigate the stories behind each photo. What happened to the body? Why did they choose to shape the hair in this way? What was the narrative behind each tattoo? Sooner or later, a “Venus de Milo” would appear in your mind with a scent of unreachable mystery.

I picked up three photos as my personal favorites. The first one was a set of cut breasts, where you could clearly see the scars from stitches. The pictures looked painful yet determined. I asked Laura what was the story behind it. She said the “person” in the picture found out their sexuality as non-binary. They thought their breasts put too much emphasis on their gender role as women. Thus they chose to cut it off, to give themselves the freedom of transiting from the pronoun of “her” to “they”.

Another picture was of a girl who openly stripped her cloth off on a public beach. Apparently, it was not a nude beach, as you could tell from the background where the clothing garment faded into hues. But she stripped it off, confidently showing her breasts away. The breasts rushed out of the bathing suit with joy and satisfaction. After all, they had been kept hidden in those covers for too long.

The third picture was of a male couple lying on the bed. The lights covered their bodies like lightweight silk, with their chest hair blatantly showing off. One trimmed that hair into the shape of a heart, the other one hollowed out the central chest hair, and thus an “empty heart” appeared. The heart-shaped emptiness was covered with the thin bushes around the nipples, waiting for the heart from the other side to click. Later, I was told the persons in the pictures were not a couple. They created a scenario for this shot as if this was their pseudo-event. My imagination was defeated by reality.

As I was hanging around the room, Raven came to me with astonishment on her face. “Can you believe it? My neighbor downstairs, a lady over 80 years old, wants to join our exhibition. I am so excited!” And then you saw an old lady walked in the room, with her back arched a bit forward. She slowly moved towards the exhibition, and her eyes were apparently filled with excitement. Probably she was thinking the same as I was, “Give Titties A Chance”.

As the night got quieter and tenderer, I finished my cigarette and was ready to farewell the friends before dived into the ruthless Dutch winter wind. The image of nipples and breasts flashed back in my mind, they made me curious. The curiosity for their audacity of showing their breasts off. The curiosity for their determination of rebellion against unreasonable societal constructs and norms. The curiosity for all those precious individual stories that were inherited inside each beautiful and unique body. As I was seeking the answer to my curiosity, I walked into the coatroom and was ready to pick up my puffer jacket. To my surprise, the hanger there could no longer stand the unbearable heaviness of all those coats and enthusiasm tonight. It fell and dropped. The journey of retrieving my jacket became rather complicated, as it was discovering each individualistic story behind it.

The other day, the exhibition ended with a harsh lockdown commanded by the Dutch government. Those titties are again being tightly kept inside the box/closet. They will expose themselves sometime again, for each precious individualistic dream.

I welcome you wholeheartedly (Ongoing Art Project)

2020 has been a starting point for us to separate. The COVID pandemic enlarged the wound between nations, cultures and individuals.

“You are not welcomed!”

Such a message alarmed me daily at the outbreak of the pandemic, from being called Corona on Saturday market to being teased for wearing the mask at the university. The hostile attitude manifested a rather cruel discourse that tried to dispel us from communication, comprehension and correlation.

We shall not let that continue.

I handwrite calligraphy in a horizontal streamer which usually appears in spring couplets. The spring couplets are traditional Chinese cultural heritage typically displayed during the spring festival. The couplets are traditionally displayed vertically on the door or wall with a horizontal streamer on top. Instead of putting the streamer on top of the vertical antithetical couplet, I hold them up and tight in my hand. I bring the horizontal streamer whenever I travel in Europe, capturing the moment through photography.

As the word written, “I welcome you wholeheartedly” in Chinese, a foreigner flags up his hospitality in a place where he could not and does not belong.