Motel Spatie 3.69

Motel Spatie is an artist-in-residence that develops and explores the concept of engaged autonomy and is a project space that promotes contemporary art as a laboratory for society.

Motel Spatie approximately host 20 foreign artists per year. In 2015 the focus in our projects will be on the gap between the lived and planned city and the consequence for self-organisations both in Presikhaaf as in the rest of the world.

The literal meaning of the Dutch (word) Spatie would be Space (as in the space between words, the in-between spaces, created with your spacebar – as we say in Dutch, SPATIEbalk).

The spaces Motel Spatie searches for and engages are the unused places in cities formed by mis-planning, restructuring, or the real estate crisis.

Motel Spatie artist-in-residence is based at the artist-run initiative Locatie Spatie in the Presikhaaf suburb. Presikhaaf emerged post-war as a result of the engagement of architecture and planning as an economic and political tool for urban improvement. The idea was to build a new social order where the individual reconciles his place in the community, a place he had lost in the modern city.

Presikhaaf was initially intended for members of Arnhem’s post-war working class. The suburb is now represented by 112 different countries. This special dynamic is compounded by extensive current demolition and restructuring by commercial and municipal energies that have changed the face the suburb.

We work with and invite artists from all over the world interested in the transformation, identity, physical or social context of the Presikhaaf neigbourhood(or simular suburbs around the world), and on this basis develop a project.

Motel Spatie residency is based in a unused officie space in a modernistic shoppingmall opened in 1965. The studios are next door in an old library that lost his function.