All I ever heard about this harbour city is that, after being bombed flat during WW2, Rotterdam was completely rebuilt by some visionary architects who made it the modern and out-of-the-way urban jungle that it is today.
Crossing its wide, busy roads feels like walking through a city; the water surfaces (which are usually so large I won’t call them ‘canals’) reflecting the skyscrapers blinking lights at night look like the open sky dotted with stars.
Since the moment I first stepped into Utrech from the back of the train station, I felt ‘something different’ hovering in the crisp winter air. It was something I haven’t ever experienced in Amsterdam, something tangible in the streets and – yet – seemingly impossible to pinpoint.
“We should ask Ammar what the traditional games played in Egypt are. Then we teach them to the kids of Bijlmer and arrange a play-day for the vernissage of the mural” I said to Anouk while we were setting the dinner table and a full white moon was shining on the wide, iconic windows of Amsterdam’s buildings.
On that afternoon, Anouk had shown me the ‘ghetto of Amsterdam’ and I couldn’t get over all those kids from various ethnicities playing together, or their laughs echoing over the lake that majestically mirrored the 11-storey wall that soon would have been painted by Ammar Abo Bakr.
Amsterdam is unlike any other city for the Iranian activist-artist brothers Icy & Sot.
Amsterdam is where they had their first solo exhibition abroad in 2011, taking their first step into the international art scene. It was an internationally acclaimed first step at that, which eventually let them to escape the persecution and censorship they experienced in their home country.