The houses along Nobelweg, in Amsterdam East, will be demolished.
The houses, stripped of every comfort, breathe the history of the many lives that unfolded between these walls.
The transition from old to new is an inescapable process that carries both the sorrow of letting go and the beauty of impermanence.
At first sight you see carcasses standing between the mountains of earth and loose building material. For the attentive viewer, a light show reveals itself on the houses, in the empty rooms.
A living room where you can see exactly where the television hung on the wall. All those rooms with signs of life, it fascinates me. The ivy against the wall, which continues to be ivy. The birds that look for worms and seeds in the turbulent earth. The sound of rustling plastic in the wind.
You enter a different world on the construction site. The bulldozers that race across the plain and leave large clouds of dust give me the feeling that I have ended up in a Western. The light is overwhelming, like in the Grand Canyon without any obstacles.
I enter the first block and smell the smell of a stripped and abandoned house, musty and damp. There are scattered pieces of wood, stones, shards of glass, tiles and old pipes. Here and there I find traces of the former inhabitants in the form of stickers on the wall, a map of Amsterdam in the meter cupboard or two wine glasses in the kitchen cabinet. For me, a window in a living room that offers a view of a mountain of earth is the ultimate example of a changing context.
This photo report is an ode to the beauty of impermanence.
