Commissioned by: BFO – Niek van Der Sprong productions. Location – Wezenlandenpark Zwolle. Period: 2009
Mind your Steps is a large-scale, socially engaged, multidisciplinary and interactive art project.
The idea of this art project was to let the festival audience become part of our enormous freethinkers’ installation and to playfully confront them with the importance of freedom, freethinkers and the responsibility that liberty entails.
At the entrance to the 135-metre-long ‘bridge’ in the shape of Zwolle’s IJssel bridge, the visiting public was presented with a flag featuring one of the 99 portraits we had selected and graphically edited. This flag was allowed to be placed somewhere on the walkway.
On the floor of the walkway lay black and white contradictions. You constantly had to make a choice which made you jump or walk down the bridge while meandering from left to right. At the same time, the audience was accompanied the entire route by a soundscape of historical speeches.
Mind Your Steps was our most extensive project ever. With the cooperation of many professionals for the construction of the footbridge (made of construction platforms), the huge canvases that had to be printed and hung, the sound system that played the soundscape over the entire 135-metre-long bridge through many speakers. Dressing the underside of the bridge, the security, the creator of the soundscape , my brother Jules Otto, and the many volunteers who helped install and letter all the floorboards.
Mind Your Steps took more than 6 months of preparation, a very intensive collaboration that cumulated in a week of set-up, and the whole project was taken down almost immediately after the last chords of the last band.
