Flemish bonds

‘What do you want, brick?’ was one of Louis Kahn’s famous rhetorical questions. These bricks, recently laid but three centuries old, obviously wanted to be a wall. But they also wanted to roam. This is ‘The Ballast Project’ in Amsterdam, by British artist Nathan Coley. His bricks have travelled round the world, some twice.

The commission came with the renovation of an important public building, the National Maritime Museum in Amsterdam. Coley was fascinated by the story of the ‘Ijsselsteentjes’ – the thin, irregular, brindled local bricks that were sent out as cheap ballast in the ships of the Dutch East and West India Companies from the 17th century onwards. They were shipped from this very building, originally a warehouse. They would be unloaded in distant ports and replaced with the return cargoes. The bricks would become far-flung buildings. They have also been found in shipwrecks.

So Coley sourced a load of original salvaged bricks in the Netherlands and sent them off in a container on the old trade routes. Along the way, original bricks joined them from Australia, Surinam and St Eustatius in the Caribbean. Once home, they were built into a wall in the northern entrance hall of the museum.

Coley carefully recorded the whole process, including the exact position in the wall of bricks from the donor countries.  So what looks like a puzzlingly mute, functionless wall turns out to be a physical narrative of the maritime and trading past of the nation, an end-stop to a sometimes controversial era. These bricks have seen a thing or two. HP