Art Metropole

#11361

Street Talk: Amsterdam

Artist

Stephen Willats

Date

2014

Format

Artists' Books

Size

15 × 22 cm

Length

32 pages

Street Talk is the record of a project by conceptual artist Stephen Willats in which he filmed (unbeknownst to them) passers-by walking down two streets in Amsterdam. The captioned film stills in Street Talk document both the endless streams of interactions that inform ‘daily life’ and the fleeting connections with friends or strangers that interrupt these streams. As Willats writes, ‘the act of walking together, side by side, is fundamental to acts of sociability; it introduces fluidity and transience in the coding of language in a relationship when perceived by an external observer.’ Between documentary observation and poetic essay, Street Talk provides an effective introduction to Willats’ recent work, where urban spaces are deconstructed in order to expose underlying ‘bandwidths’ of visual, textual and aural information.

This edition comes with a foldout map of Amsterdam.

Paperback. Colour and black & white illustrations. English text.