Various artists
The Fifth Season

Spring/Summer 1998

The designer Christoph Seyferth was the first guest in The Fifth Season. He was commissioned to design a studio with living space and to change the appearance of the pavilion, so that both inside and outside it would be distinct from the clinic. Under the title ‘Spartan Luxury’, he converted the pavilion and designed a set of mobile furniture. Apart from the bed and a swing, which hangs in one of the rooms, all the furniture is on wheels, including the huge light-blue bathtub. In this way, each artist can decide for themselves which space will be used for which purpose. Seyferth’s distinct design is in visual contrast to the uniformity of the other pavilions, with their identical, somewhat dull furnishing, and makes this lodging into a special, anything but Spartan, experience.

Autumn 1998

The Italian Mario Rizzi works mainly in photography. For his project he worked with the patients of the Roosenburg, the only closed section of the Willem Arntsz Hoeve. He handed out more than two hundred disposable cameras to these patients. This is what he says about his project: ‘They were able to express themselves freely by means of photographic images. Art enabled them to enter into a dialogue with the outside world, not to present themselves as a threatening presence, but as people in their own home. Their lives and their emotions emerge from their pictures. I was both the designer and the catalyst of a creative experience. I think that in these three months full of encounters, the patients and I came closer together by breaking down people’s fear and revulsion. The patients were fully aware of the fact that they were creating art and that by means of their pictures they were able to invite the public to look at their lives without prejudice.’ Rizzi compiled a book entitled ‘They tell me
I am sick but I function good’, which features their photos, in close consultation with these ad hoc photographers. In addition, in The Fifth Season he mounted an exhibition called ‘US’, comprising self-portraits of the patients. This exhibition was also shown at The Cheerful House, at Oulun in Finland, in June 2000.

Spring/Summer 1999

Dick Tuinder had decided to work in five different disciplines in the fives rooms of The Fifth Season. During his stay at Den Dolder he realised that his idea of beauty did not in any way correspond to that held by the patients. By calling himself a ‘beauty specialist’ he opted for an ironic confrontation, but there was hardly any reaction to this. He subsequently focused on the process of rotting and death in the woods, wrote poems, did drawings and sought a representation of ‘delusion and sense’ by drawing masks. He had conversations on these topics with patients, and these are described in his book Heimwee naar de Oersoep for the Primal Ooze, written during his stay at The Fifth Season. He also published a new internal newspaper, the Rümke Gazette. He ended his stay with an exhibition.

Summer/Autumn 1999

This was the first time a family had stayed at The Fifth Season. They were the artists Fransje Killaars and Roy Villevoye and their daughter Céline. Villevoye’s projects in previous years had been defined by his visits to the Asmat area of New Guinea. The inhabitants of this region attach great ceremonial and emotional importance to trees, from which they carve superb sculptures. Villevoye recognises the therapeutic significance that can be derived from the working of wood: carving your name, carving marks with a highly personal or, conversely, a universal meaning. He asked several patients to carve marks in trees in the grounds. He documented this project in a book entitled ‘Kerven *’. There was some upset about the mutilation of the trees, and forty letters of protest were sent to the management. In this way society made itself felt in an unexpected way.

Fransje Killaars became fascinated by the enormous addiction to smoking among many patients and carers. She asked them all to save their cigarette ends and give them to her. Together with them she threaded the thousands of pieces together to form a large curtain, as a collective work of art. For her this work was symbolic of this small freedom the patients have: the last bit of craving in which to dream away from the everyday, unwell reality. This ‘curtain’ was exhibited in The Fifth Season and in early 2001 was shown at the Galerie De Expeditie in Amsterdam.

Winter/Spring 1999-2000

During their stay, the artist duo of De Rijke and De Rooij wrote the scripts for three short films. Although they are not a literal account of their experiences at the institution, they consider these films to be a direct consequence of it. Immediately after their stay they left for Jakarta to shoot one of the scripts. The result was Bantar Gebang, a 16 mm film shot at the main rubbish dump in Jakarta. It is a film about watching and being watched, about the boundaries of privacy and the impossibility of a judgement. The films were shown at The Fifth Season and can been seen on www.smba.nl/shows

Autumn 2000

The contributions made by David Bade and Ellen Ligteringen are still evolving. Ellen Ligteringen is creating a website in close cooperation with several patients.

David Bade will be coming back to The Fifth Season in May 2002 to run a workshop project for seasonal workers in the woods on the clinic site. In collaboration with ten patients and ten students from Bremen, the Aki in Enschede, the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam and the Academy in Maastricht, he intends to create ‘Het Robin Hood Fitness Centre/Fuck Nature, veggies and cannabis’. He wants to build actual apparatus, vehicles and sculptures that can be used to train one’s fitness ‘im Wald’, leading to a sort of training circuit gone wild.

Winter 2000/2001

Christiaan Bastiaans has been engaged for several years on the ‘Hurt Models’ project, for which met child soldiers from Sierra Leone, as well as other people. Its theme is the feeling of rootlessness and the loss of the home. This is connected to the issues arising in a psychiatric institution. For The Fifth Season, he created a performance entitled Real Lear, based on Shakespeare’s King Lear. At individual sessions with Bastiaans, the patients read aloud passages from the play for recording on tape. The patients’ spontaneous reactions to the characters in the play were also recorded. A tape was edited and this was played during the performance. Bastiaans then used this text and his conversations with the patients about their characters’ costumes to make ‘Clothing Sculptures’ and also photographic works that served as a
setting.

Spring 2001

For Erik van Lieshout it was a special experience to return to a psychiatric institution once again, having previously worked in one as an activity leader. Because he found it very quiet in the grounds of the clinic, he decided to make a sound-car, what he called a hip-hop car. He bought a secondhand car at a breaker’s yard in Den Dolder. He removed the doors, the bonnet and the boot-lid and used them to make two huge loudspeakers which he mounted on the roof of the car. He drove round the clinic grounds in this ‘sculpture’, with deafening hip-hop music blasting out of the speakers. As he said, ‘they could use a bit of music.’ At every corner there was a patient who wanted to go along for the ride. The wilder ones went along and took their friends with them too. During his presentation the car was converted into a bar with sound installation and there was dancing late into the night. The car was shown in the exhibition ‘Naughty by nature, not because I hate you’ at the Groninger Museum in April 2002.

Winter 2001/Spring 2002

It was as early as the first week of her stay that Alwine van Heemstra wrote the scenario for a video documentary on the perils of moving the clinic’s ecumenical chapel. By her doing, The Fifth Season became a meeting place for many patients and guests, her husband Berend Strik and their young son Mathijs. It was also here that she met Helma Zindel, a patient who had already lived in the clinic for ten years. It was decided to organise an exhibition of Helma’s work in The Fifth Season. Her highly personal drawings and paintings, together with Van Heemstra’s account of her choice of Helma, provide a superb picture of their meeting. Almost all the works were sold to fellow patients, therapists and visitors during the opening. Part of the profits from the sale was spent on creating the patients’ diary, a wish Helma had cherished for a long time. She asked Alwine to create a concept for this. Van Heemstra suggested setting up a cooperative project involving patients and prominent members of society. The results of this collaboration would be recorded in the diary. It has to be attractive to both the patients and the outside world and will be ready in 2004. By way of a farewell, Alwine and Berend organised a disco evening with rapping patients and Strik on the drums.

Together with the architect Matthijs Bouw, Berend Strik designed a house for identical twins in America who suffer from Gilles de la Tourette syndrome. During his stay at The Fifth Season he developed the ‘Jeltje’ project, in which he continued his research into architecture for people with a psychological disorder. Jeltje is the name of a building that was demolished. To replace it, a building had to be designed to fit perfectly the individual needs of the patients who will live there permanently, and which in addition will be able to play a part in developing the architecture. He hopes to develop a programme of requirements on the basis of conversations with the future residents. The initial document he made for this project comprises collages
that depict the patients’wish-dreams and what they have to say about their dwelling-place. It will take four or five years to develop a design as far as the actual building of the homes. The clinic is supporting the project.