Originally, in Puritan communities in Country, only church members Best travel USA had the right to vote in church matters and take communion. Membership was attained by testifying before Best travel USA the congregation to a conversion experience or moment of revelation. As time passed, fewer children of members were testifying, and thus they were denied church membership. In 1662, a Massachusetts synod agreed that adults who had been baptized would be allotted a half-way membership. They could have their children baptized in the church, but neither they nor their children could vote or take communion until they had experienced conversion. Handbill.
Zara Stanhope Australian National University
The geographical expansion of Amsterdam in response to global and local population pressures provides the site for Dutch artist Jeanne van Heeswijk to research social life and space in the new edge suburb of IJburg. She uses social art’ as a means to re-imagine how life could be more publically minded within state-controlled urban design. In 2005 van Heeswijk negotiated the use of The Blue House (Het Blauwe Huis), an exceptionally large Dutch home with a blue exterior on the new island of Haveneiland, IJburg.1 IJburg’s streets, waterways, architecture, public space, nature reserves, marina, public tram, shops and community centre were pre-planned by the Amsterdam Projectburo in pursuit of a holistic but diverse social environment. This level of bureaucratic spatial control is what David Harvey (2000) characterizes as a form of neo-liberalized urban authoritarianism.
This chapter explores The Blue House as a site-related project (Kwon 2004), which creates an analytical and discursive relationship to urban life through a responsive and reflexive form of cultural production. As a social art project, The Blue House research project employs many processes and methods that borrow from the techniques of the participant-observer of anthropology, which assisted the engagement of artists with residents and their mutual participation in temporary and permanent projects. While the social processes and relations support artists to reside independently and research or undertake fieldwork at IJburg, the relations created by The Blue House also partly undermined van Heeswijk’s intention of independence while indicating its success. This chapter also critically interrogates the potential of The Blue House for raising awareness of the local and global significance of relationality between hosts and guests, citizens and non-citizens and self and others.
