One Day

Susanne Kriemann’s ONE DAY is the third book in a series of portraits, in book form, of the City of Rotterdam, that Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art has been producing in collaboration with artists who are particularly concerned with photographic medium.

Kriemann explores how images circulate and how displacement is represented in photography. For this project Kriemann collected a long list of books about Rotterdam, all of which have been published since its devastating bombing by the Luftwaffe in May 1940. The second largest city in The Netherlands and arguably the most culturally diverse, Rotterdam is unique in that its rebuilding did not focus on restoring the pre-war urban fabric, but instead became a multi-faceted experiment in architecture and urban planning that at times mirrors, and at times seems at odds with its evolving social composition. From the books she collected, which document Rotterdam’s evolution, Kriemann selected 115 images and imposed a structure that is at once drastic and mundane: The flow of images in her book condense the experience of time by subtly tracing the course of one day, from dawn until dusk.

If information and representations today are perpetually “under-construction” within the digital world, might the printed book remain a place of rest and of in-depth reflection where one reading is not enough? How does the building a new book entirely out of existing books reconsider the ecology of the image and the social fabric of the city, making palpable the abstract notions of second readings, second takes and even second lives?These are just some of the questions raised by ONE DAY.