The ‘Amsterdam Biennale’ in 2009 was linked to a project called the Mediamatic Travel Guide. The Dutch art, design & new media outfit Mediamatic set up an online travel agency for alternative cultural tourism. The idea was great, so was the website with 71 cities described in detail by their guides, crazy places like Asuncion in Paraguay or Erbil in Kurdistan, along with more familiar places like Kobe in Japan or Nairobi. However, for whatever reason, the project never took off: it never found its audience.

The website seems to have been taken down now, which is too bad because it was a great document. I wrote just about everything on the Kabul page and coordinated/oversaw the creation of the page on Skopje, the capital of (Northern) Macedonia, which was created by members of its cultural community during a workshop I gave there in March 2010.

Back to the Biennale: I had been asked by one of the curators of the Rotterdam Architecture Biennale to prepare a presentation on transformations in Kabul for their ‘Open City’ 2009 edition. When in Kabul in February 2009 I did serious research on the urban effects of Western security measures for the experience of the city of both Afghans and Westerners. It brought back many of the issues explored in the context of Baghdad in my 2007 Green Zone / Red Zone exhibition, so I called it ‘Green Zone Kabul’.

The project proposal with illustrations and all backgrounds can be found here. But the Biennale organization decided to cut me out (not on the merits of my proposal, which wasn’t examined, but for budgetary reasons and internal politics) so I brought the study to the cheekily named ‘Amsterdam Biennale’ of Mediamatic, in which they asked city guides to prepare a physical installation.

Mediamatic gave each curator a 2×2 m space, a choice between 4 different pavilion designs (in cardboard, foam, bamboo and something else) and a 200 Euro budget for expenses. Visuals and information about the project can be found online, here

Kabul Pavilion for the Amsterdam Biennial