When Dutch seamen went on strike in 1911, Rotterdam’s shipping companies brought in Chinese labourers who were willing to strike-break and work for a fraction of what their European counterparts were paid. Many would settle in the Katendrecht neighbourhood, just over the water from the old city and amid the docks’ vast warehouses, quays and cranes. In a neat echo of what became continental Europe’s first Chinatown, the biggest of the Katendrecht’s warehouses has now been converted by Chinese architect Ma Yansong into a museum of migration.
The Fenix is housed in a building that once accommodated the fruits of the trade between Europe and America, right opposite the elaborate 1901 brick headquarters of the Holland America Line, once a squat, now the Hotel New York. The neighbourhood was a red-light district in the early 20th century and went through phases as seedy and dark, poor but sexy and, as so often happens, cool, arty and ultimately gentrified.
Now the century-old concrete warehouse has been cleared out, cleaned up and crowned with a super-shiny swirl of polished stainless steel. Inside is a museum of art which all relates in some way to migration, ranging from a Holbein portrait of Erasmus (Dutch and peripatetic) to a “Refugee Astronaut” by Yinka Shonibare.
The first thing to say is that the gallery spaces, on the two huge upper floors, are sensational. I seriously doubt any architect could have built from scratch anything better. The concrete structure has been left raw and intact, framing the art in an industrial material language which is somehow both permanent and solid and yet suggests the transitoriness of goods stored only until they travel somewhere else. The light is magical, pouring in from both sides via the original windows and slightly angled clerestories. It might have been built in 1922 but it has a tinge of 1970s brutalism, very fashionable. Those windows also afford panoramic views across the city, taking in a chaotic modern skyline which might only be matched by London’s for its anarchic, apparently unplanned energy, daring and ugliness. The exhibits are always tied back to the city outside, one of Europe’s fastest-changing and most diverse.
The centrepiece here is not an artwork but an architectural intervention. Beijing-based Ma Yansong is known for his fluid and occasionally unlikely buildings, revelling in the kind of double helix curves that would have been impossible before the huge computing power of the modern age. One of China’s most successful and admired architects, Ma often invokes the imaginative forms of shan shui, traditional Chinese depictions of landscapes in which mountains and streams form into complex, mystical layers, rendering three dimensions into two and producing new forms. He is currently designing George Lucas’s huge Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles, due to open next year.
For Rotterdam he has created a tangle, an intertwined pair of spirals that wind up through the building, kissing occasionally and exploding out beyond its roof. It might be a staircase, the main route up through the building, but this is not really about function. The gleaming stair, which the museum refers to as the “Tornado”, twists its way up to become a logo, a landmark on a dockside increasingly dominated by towers. It looks like a shredded Anish Kapoor sculpture. “Migration is all about movement,” Ma tells me, standing in the sunshine on the roof, “and I wanted to express movement at the heart of this building, an experience for visitors.”
It all looks extremely expensive. I understand that one stainless steel panel takes 100 hours to polish. There are 297 panels. And they will need to be polished as long as they are there. It is, I suppose, a way of competing with the city’s burgeoning skyline using surprise and complexity rather than scale and height. I was unsure whether it was an excessive intervention into what is otherwise a functional and extremely fine building. But every museum needs its logo and the experience of bursting through the roof in this spinning vortex, 30 metres over once-buzzing docks (now being reimagined as leisure space, with a sandy beach emerging on one end), is certainly memorable.
The real interest, however, lies inside. Two floors of art are thoroughly engaging and finely curated. There are terrific set pieces including Red Grooms’ “The Bus”, a cartoonish, full-size New York bus which visitors can walk into to find shonkily sculpted human passengers. There are blockbuster works such as Willem de Kooning’s “Man in Wainscott” and provocative pieces like Francis Alÿs’s sly study of borders, “Geographies”. The diversity of media, scales and styles neatly reflects the diversity of the subject.
Interspersed with the artworks are artefacts, often mundane or familiar objects which here, in this setting, take on new meanings. A set of Delft tiles depicting various stereotypes of foreigners reminds us that migration is not new but that materials travel, too: Delft, informed by Chinese ceramics, went everywhere. Elsewhere, antisemitic and anti-immigrant pamphlets illustrate long-standing hatreds.
Back downstairs, one room is occupied by a “suitcase labyrinth”. Built from 2,000 cases, steamer-trunks and chests, many decorated with labels and stickers from hotels around the world, it is a slightly clunky but nevertheless effective metaphor for movement. Each case was donated along with its stories, each a record of a life of travel. There is something a little unsettling about it, a reminder, perhaps, of the piles of personal artefacts in Holocaust museums, even though the fates of most of these travellers were less traumatic. The other big exhibition space is currently occupied by The Family of Migrants, a show of almost 200 photos inspired by MoMA’s 1955 The Family of Man, perhaps the most widely visited and travelled photo exhibition of all time. It is an intensely moving exhibition, shot through with drama, sadness and longing.
The final space is next door to the museum and independent of it. The huge “Plein” (public square) is a community hall, a fully flexible public space of 2,275 square metres which, the museum’s director Anne Kremers suggests, will evolve with and for the community: “It has already been used for Chinese New Year celebrations and will host a food market, meals and events.”
This is an ambitious and enlightened museum and an admirable example of architectural reuse, and it opens in an era of sharply increasing hostility towards immigrants in the Netherlands with a resurgent far right triumphing in recent elections. Privately funded, by the Droom en Daad (“Dream and Do”) Foundation, which is itself the legacy of the Holland America shipping line, it has more freedom than if it were tied to government. And that freedom will be critical.
As I’m leaving the museum I run into Wim Pijbes, the irrepressible former director of the Rijksmuseum and founder and managing director of Droom en Daad. “This museum is great,” he says. “It allows us to make connections. This was where Albert Einstein, Johnny Weissmuller and Lee Harvey Oswald sailed from,” he grins mischievously, while unchaining his bicycle.
The Fenix is destined to be a perennially pertinent place. And the circularity, from its funding, its brilliant reimagining of a warehouse and the choice of a Chinese architect building on the edge of the former Chinatown, reveals a city profoundly aware of its history, but not at all afraid of its future.
fenix.nl
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