“Terrains Vagues: drawing in the sandbox from Hoog Catharijne till Leidscherijn” is a tactile/visual presentation in ExPodium/Krügerstraat 11 Utrecht I will do on friday evening June 26 sliding through forty years of digging up and covering of urban and rural landscapes in and around Utrecht. The new expansions of the city show a policy of acres of low rise houses with a drawing board sham individualization. Is there a way out of this MortageTopia and the vampirization of the old inner city by allienated suburbians. Hoog Catharijne is the first mega-shopping mall in the Netherlands build during the end of the sixties and seventies, covering the area from the railways station to the old inner city; Leidserijn is a new suburbian settelement at the south-west side of Utrecht covering yet another typical Dutch meadow landscape with sand and car-oriented privat dwellings…
The website of the venue Expodium (center for young artist in the town of Utrecht) has some more details on the context and the rest of the program…. You may enjoy the cover-up process of the Dutch landscape in action via Google Maps … and fly back to the old Utrecht city center at the north-east from this spot to get a good understanding of Dutch urban policy …
A firm layer of sand is sprayed over the old landscape to create a tabula rasa for the mortgage architecture.. curious is the fact that the road next to the canal is called "sand road" (zandweg).
This short study in the urban history of Utrecht and surroundings brought so many pictures and associations that I decided to do a more extensive study on the subject. The planning of the what can be called “our national center of consumerism” must have started now fifty years ago with the construction of the first clover leaf road system south of Utrecht, the first Dutch shopping mall intruding the inner town, the first pay automat system for petrol tanking and the first credit card automat installed in the Netherlands. All this happened in and around Utrecht. You can follow my working process on this new visual history scroll, on-line, just click the screen shot picture below…
the limping messenger 
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