“Naked City” is an art installation commissioned by Frans Hals Museum, exploring issues of freedom and democracy in public space.

Across an 18 month period including 2 research residencies (hosted by local artist run space 37PK) the artists spent time walking the streets of Haarlem, its surroundings and peripheries as well as major cities including Amsterdam and Rotterdam. The title of the project 'Naked City' draws from the same name as Guy Debord's 1957 drawing / diagram visually describing the Situationist walking practice of "derive". The installation was and engagement with this practice in a contemporary moment in the global city and public space that was marked by the shifts and contradictions of the coronavirus pandemic and its social, political and spatial fall outs.

Building on the artists previous interests in street notices, for 'Naked City' they developed this as a site specific approach and documented and collected an array of public notices, adverts and stickers, often left anonymously across urban spaces. This approach further addressed specific site based concerns of the museum's commission, namely its recent audience research that showed the lack of diversity of museum visitors as well as the curatorial framework for the commission as highlighting leading contemporary institutional critique practices.

For the commission the artists developed a site-specific installation consisting of 21 large scale hand-painted and printed panels the restaged found street notices. What were small and easily overlooked, were enlarged as bold, black and white texts and graphics, giving people a chance to pause and engage with diverse and contested ideas of freedom and democracy in our present moment.

The installation spans across the whole fence of the Egelantier, a building in the centre of Haarlem and in process of transformation from a public space (a former hospital turned squat turned arts and community centre) to a private space (a hotel). Placed here the work also draws attention to the ways that cities change and questions which voices are given a place in this.

Lloyd Corporation description of the research process for developing 'Naked City':

“During the creation of Naked City we spent weeks walking through the streets of Haarlem, Amsterdam and Rotterdam. We were drawn to the hand-made notices, advertisements and stickers affixed to the lampposts across public spaces, posted by anonymous people and typically overlooked by most passers-by. We began photographing and collecting these notices from the city streets, fascinated by how these marginal and unassuming materials make visible the complex, urgent and often conflicting perspectives on major political issues in society. As we walked through the cobbled streets of Haarlem’s old town centre we found a heart-shaped piece of white card-board crudely taped to a drainage pipe with the words “Nederlands 100% democratie”. We will never know who posted this sign, but it provokes us to ask questions – do we agree with the statement? Is this a hope for a possible future? Is it a joke or satire?”

“As we walked through the city collecting these notices, we would regularly encounter people who worked on the streets. We met Mohamed outside the Albert Heijn and Hema stores in Haarlem, where he sells copies of Straatjournal, a magazine to raise money for homeless people. Mohamed came to Netherlands 15 years ago to seek asylum and has become a public character in the city, where everyone knows him including the mayor, and yet he still has to navigate a punitive immigration system every week. Meeting Mohamed and hearing his story gave us another lens through which to see the contradictory issues of freedom, democracy, public space and power that exist in cities like Haarlem, and which our work Naked City attempts to address.”

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/39381