Blue Meetings

Blue Meetings was a weekly conversational platform hosted within The Blue House, a temporary artistic community situated in the basement of the Kalvertoren shopping center in Amsterdam. Co-hosted by Paes Leão and Roe Cherpac, the project transformed a commercial space into a porous public forum for critical dialogue.

Against the backdrop of a rapidly changing city, Blue Meetings invited artists, researchers, and local residents to gather and discuss urgent social and urban themes. The series functioned as a "living room" in the public domain, fostering encounters between diverse voices that might otherwise remain separated. Topics ranged from the contradictions of urban development (such as the nearby IJburg project) to broader questions of community, identity, and the role of art in society.

Key Objectives:

Creating Porous Space: To demonstrate how space gains meaning through use, turning a transient basement into a stable point of social connection.

Critical Witnessing: To provide a platform where participants could act as "witnesses" to urban transformation, sharing perspectives from within the system rather than as detached observers.

Community Building: To bridge the gap between the temporary artistic community of The Blue House and the wider public of Amsterdam.

Blue Meetings laid the conceptual groundwork for subsequent projects like KijkRuimte, particularly in its exploration of space as a flexible medium and the artist’s responsibility as an active participant in social processes.