“Call of the Mall”

It started out so idealistically: Built in 1973, the Hoog Catharijne shopping mall in Utrecht, the Netherlands, was for a moment the world’s largest and most luxurious of its kind. The Brutalist building was inspired by Situationist Constant Nieuwenhuys’s New Babylon, an imaginary postrevolutionary utopian city designed to privilege homo ludens (man at play) that was conceptually conceived between 1959 and 1974. Predominantly based around an approximately forty-five-thousand-square-foot shopping mall, Hoog Catharijne was also intended to be a complete city, including rooftop gardens, apartments, a theater, and a monastery—Constant’s objective laid over a capitalistic framework. Ten years after its construction, Hoog Catharijne was best known for its crime, vandalism, and drugs—a retail heaven turned social hell.

In the context of a grand renovation scheme begun in 2010, curators Carlijn Diesfeldt, Nicolette Gast, Maaike Lauwaert, and Huib Haye van der Werf took up the mall as a paradigm for changing values in society in the Netherlands with respect to globalization, digitalization, economic crisis, and the rise of new conservatism in that nation. Their goal was to produce an exhibition that would respond to these changes in real time by actively confronting an audience with a variety of videos, installations, and performances by artists from around the world. Fernando Sánchez Castillo’s Tank Man, 2013, a life-size sculpture of the anonymous Chinese man who famously stopped a military tank on Tiananmen Square, succeeds in confronting and blocking public passage. Ester van de Wiel’s rooftop vegetable garden (including a chicken run) refers to the now vanished pleasure gardens, turning them into a more contemporary format of a small-scale farm where rooftop-grown produce can be bought. Pilvi Takala’s Permit-Full Zone, 2013, a designated area where anyone can perform before an audience without a license—exceptional in this mall where a permit is needed for any sort of public expression—stimulates a sense of community. While as a response to global changes “Call of the Mall” is ambitious to its own detriment, it is a poignant reminder of Constant’s imagined, idealistic city, one where homo ludens reigns free.