Long time no sea
Ab van Hanegem
the Atlantic Wall. In 1944 Flushing was heavily bombed by allied forces to pave the way for their march on Berlin.
When the former cinema was torn down in 2004,1 went to see the nazi murals removed for conservation by the city's
marine museum. A new cinema was built by the son of a German war refugee. For a decade it hosted the movie event:
Film by the Sea.
The pattern of permanent destruction and reconstruction dining foreign occupations became typical of Flushing.
The resulting impact of traumatic bombing experience in the minds of the flushing population to this very day, led to
a fascination for tearing down everything which somehow reminds them of the past. The most important yearly event is
the enthusiastic celebration of Liberation Day on the fifth of May, when a hundred thousand kids go crazy during the pop
festival, which marks the beginning of the tourist season. Over the centuries of resistance to foreign military destruction,
Flushing people have cultivated a revolutionary anarchistic spirit for construction, - both individually and socially -, to
be found also in cities like Rotterdam, Haarlem, Leiden and Alkmaar, that suffered equally from terror by foreign siege.
Ab does not really like to talk about his first twenty years in Flushing, until a locomotive crosses his mind. He
cherishes the memory of the playgrounds close to the huge Royal Scheldt Wharf, were not only big ocean liners were
built, but also a multitude of military vessels. The city must have been pounding with industrial noise most of the day.
When a ship was ready and being launched in the docks with a ritual champagne ceremony, all the town's folks went out
to witness the launching and get their feet wet. Huge ships were towering over the inner city. Sometimes other passing
vessels were blown on the beach in stormy weather. Furthermore Van Hanegem remembered a poet from the 60s called
Hans Verhagen, living on the prestigious boulevard, who went to interview the Rolling Stones and the Who in London.
Flushing then still ran a ferry line to London. By the mid 70s however, the Royal Scheldt Wharf, with a labour force of
5000 skilled workers, broke down. The Dutch had lost their competitive position in shipbuilding to the Japanese, who
could produce cheaper but bigger oil tankers. Gradually the Scheldt rive became a polluted open sewer due to sloppy
Belgian environmental regulations at the ports of Antwerp and Ghent. Most of the working force was on dole and long
term umemployment was the fate of an impoverished white trash population. The bad situation lasted till the mid 90s.
But van Hanegem likes to cultivate an optimistic view of his home town, which can be summarized in a dictum, that
originally applied to the port of Halifax (Canada), the biggest allied naval base in the western hemisphere in the Second
World War, with an inevitable equally large contingent of prostitutes. What happens in Flushing, remains in Flushing!
Ab van Hanegem is the square root exponent of the Flushing revolutionary mentality, which has to be liberal and
fundamentalist at the same time. A famous member of the Van Hanegem family today, the international soccer player
Willem van Hanègem, is often quoted for his dry and personal understatement of tactical solutions to typical Dutch
problems of domestic and foreign policy. The same modest and ironic approach to life, art and its accomplishments,
is to found in the character of Ab van Hanegem, whom I have known for twenty-five years.
Our common biography goes back to the middle 80s, when Van Hanegem was a student at the Sint Joost art academy
in Breda, the old city in western Brabant, some eighty miles east of Flushing. A rapper in those days I had to perform in
the Beyerd Museum in the fall of 1984 on the occasion of a group show of local artists like Harry de Kroon and Jacques
van Poppel, internationals like Boris Nieslony from Cologne's Black Market network and the exotic Japanese Marie
Kawazu from Paris. The show was called: Parallel Movement, and referred to a comparable development of art scenes on
different geographical locations. Driving by taxi from the railway station to the Museum, I noticed a mile of American
Socars, inhabited by grim looking gypsy folk and black men in grey suits, matched by white borsalino hats, sitting and
smoking in their parked cars. It looked like a mafia gathering, a silent demonstration of some kind of threat against
something I wasn't aware of at that moment. Upon entering the museum a sloppy long haired fr friendly man welcomed
me. He introduced himself as Guillaume Bijl from the nearby city of Antwerp. I had to perform my act at the top of a
spiral staircase, which led to a gym, where a dozen girls were doing their workout from a video in the fashionable style
set by Jane Fonda. Mister Bijl introduced me to the gym's coach, a blond muscle man, who offered a glass of wine and
told me to relax. In the energetic and sexy entourage during the last minutes before the official opening I started to cool
down. All went very well. The speech was applauded with great enthusiasm. Not so much because I concluded with
the statement: hoist the sails!, -a comment on parallel artistic moves in Breda and Amsterdam-, but mostly because of
the sport girls that, like a whirlwind, changed into a sexy cheerleaders outfit to perform a brilliant support act.
VI I
3 april t/m 12 juni 2011
Marie Tak van Poortvliet Museum Domburg, Ooststraat 10a, Domburg
www.marietakvanpoortvlietmuseumdomburg.nl visual Bureau [Ssse]
