The room as “organized chaos”

There is so much to see in Gijs’ room; a work in progress that has been in the making ever since Gijs was a young kid. Everywhere you look, you can discover more and more trinkets and treasures. A mouse trap stuck to the wall, cans of spray paint stacked on the floor, a little lego figurine tucked behind a bottle… you can spend hours feasting your eyes on everything!

Since he was three years old, Gijs lived in this room under his parents’ roof. When he reached the age where he was able to change the interior of the room to his liking, it became a template for him to develop his passion for art. Gijs tells us that one of the first decisions he made was to paint a section of the wall in a bold turquoise color. From then, he started collecting all kinds of objects and interesting paraphernalia, from his family and friends, or simply from the streets, which he hung up on the walls and used to create a very personal and unique interior collage.

In the course of growing up, he became more and more interested in art, and started to develop skills in drawing, painting and sculpting. Just like the pieces he collected, he merged his own art into the collage of his room, and slowly but surely, every spot on the wall, every nook and cranny came to be filled with eye catching and colorful pieces.

“Organized chaos” are the words that Gijs uses to describe his living space vis à vis atelier, and this organized chaos is a signifier for Gijs’ identity. This story explores to what extent objects have the ability to reflect identity, especially through their collectability, personal roots and accumulated history. The salience of these objects might predominantly lie in the fact that they are unexposed, and that they make up the fibres of one’s innermost living space. Our experience of the city space is necessarily kept away from what happens inside the homes of other inhabitants, whereas we all have a home with objects that define who we are. So what happens behind the closed doors of others? What stories do we encounter when someone opens up their living space to the outside world?