Saturday, February 15, 2025

5:00 – 8:00 PM

Exhibition Opening: BRIANNA LEATHERBURY: The Drain

Join us for the opening of The Drain, an exhibition by BRIANNA LEATHERBURY

In the winter of 2022, when heating prices skyrocketed to unaffordable heights, Brianna Leatherbury began producing makeshift solar panel heaters from salvaged construction materials and with tips gleaned from online DIY communities. Eventually, these heaters began doubling as sculptures, continuing Leatherbury’s commitment to revealing the realities of living conditions—and the negligence of those who mandate them from above. In this vein, Leatherbury’s works are often context-specific spatial experiments, that in their formal make-up—plated copper inserted into broken radiator parts, relocated mobile cold rooms, greenhouse humidifiers rigged to purify the inner cavities of auctioned buildings—can be repeated and reconfigured in other places. Through consistently working with the same materials relocated, and dispensing them to alter the physical conditions of a room, Leatherbury tauntingly reveals otherwise hidden currents of exchange at play in any given site.

Cue The Drain: a heating system composed from recycled building materials and appliances, retrofitted into the exhibition spaces of A Tale of A Tub. Opening in the midst of winter, the goal is to warm selected parts of the building for the duration of the exhibition period, after which, the system will be dismantled and returned to the recycled building material market.

This isn’t a speculative exercise born from resourcefulness or a showroom for home improvement tips, however. The housing crisis is a heating crisis too, and since it was built in 1922—at a time in which the ‘social’ in social housing simply meant for the people—central heating has always been a central issue of the Justus van Effencomplex as well. On the one hand, it is lauded as the first building of its kind in the Netherlands to have a centralised heating system, on the other, what was once an advancement in modern living conditions now leaves residents without an affordably functioning way of warming their houses in the present day. As a constituent of the complex, the same issue applies to A Tale of A Tub, too.

As for the surrounding area of Spangen, it has long been referred to as ‘the drain’ of Rotterdam, plagued by drug tourism in the 1980s and 90s—for which there was little municipal support and almost no public services—and populated predominantly by working class and immigrant communities. Surely a subtext of this categorisation, the Dutch saying het afvoerputje van de maatschappij—‘the drain of society’—refers to those who are a ‘strain’ on the housing and social systems; to, effectively, those in need.

In bringing the history of the complex in conversation with the history of the area within which it resides, Leatherbury attempts to navigate the age-old conflict between public and private interests in the creation of social spaces. In the spirit of their dialogical practice, in which conversation figures as a key research tool, this project has been informed by a series of meetings with figures crucial to the social (re)organisation of the Justus van Effencomplex: neighbour and volunteer tour guide Theun Huisman; Eric Smulders, administrative secretary at Woonstad Rotterdam; and Joris Molennar, lead architect and architectural historian at Molenaar and Co., the studio who oversaw the renovation of the complex in 2009. Additionally, Antonina Iakovleva has worked as a curatorial assistant and key conversation partner throughout the whole process.