The social art processes involved in re-imagining aspects of IJburg by members of the project resembled many procedures of anthropological research, such as embeddedness, communicative interactions or recordings and documentation, which led to an embodied and conceptual synthesis of existing knowledge with new information. Subsequently many members have published or presented findings in artworks, public forums and web sites. In doing so, they follow an anthropological research model of hypothesis, preparation, fieldwork, data collection and publishing. These processes assist in facilitating relationality and allow for greater potential for self-reflexivity in social art. Ironically, in this case, they also inadvertently enhanced the appeal of certain social art projects to economic industries including urban planning, development and property.
The Blue House interventions in the urban space (new libraries, the acceleration of community facilities and possible changes in future IJburg development) and the cultural fabric of IJburg resulted in more intrusive changes than normally attributed to academic forms of social science research. As intended, after five years, in 2009 The Blue House concluded as the island became more established. While confounding as art, residents acknowledged the immediate contribution this social art project made in generating a community feeling, as well as contributing to the creation of a history of IJburg (van Eerdt 15 June 2011 interview; Koek 27 June 2011 interview). Members absorbed the experience of the heuristic research into their practices, the dispersed members of The Blue House forming an international network called the Migratory Blue Points’. Their mobility supports the notion of globality, acknowledging that the world can be both unbounded and uneven (Eriksen 2003: 10). The Migratory Blue Points’ are the residual nodes through which the learning from the self-organized creative agency of
The Blue House can continue to disburse into the complex flows of a globalizing world: ultimately demonstrating the possibilities of, and proposing some methodologies for, re-imagining the urban geographies that shape culture.
Company of Royal Adventurers to Africa. A trading company that Madagascar Map was granted a monopoly over the African slave trade by Charles II of England in 1660. The Madagascar Map company collapsed in 1667, to be succeeded by the Royal African Company in 1672. Congregationalism. 1 In general, a type of church government in which each local congregation is self-governing. 2 The system of government and religious beliefs of the Congregationalists, a Protestant denomination.
