# Leslie Robbins and the bike tour origins of Piet Zwart Institute's & Willem de Kooning Academy's research programs

## Florian Cramer, 6/2024


When I met Leslie Robbins for the first time in September 2004, I had come to Rotterdam from Berlin for a three-month fellowship. It was part of the very first research professorship of Willem de Kooning Academy and Piet Zwart Institute, and at that time, I had no idea that I would inherit it four years later, become a Rotterdammer, and continue to work in the same job position twenty years later.

September 2004 coincided with a new school year and a new cohort of - mostly international - master's students arriving at Piet Zwart Institute, which at that time mainly consisted of the Fine Art and Media Design programs. Leslie was the person who made my life and work in Rotterdam possible in the first place. It turned out that even for the three-month residency, I needed to be put on a regular work contract with Hogeschool Rotterdam, which required a Dutch social security number, a Dutch bank account, and all the necessary registrations and paperwork in various Catch-22s, such as: no bank account without a social security number and no social security number without a bank account. This was the recurring drama that only Leslie knew how to navigate and resolve, for almost every single tutor and student at Piet Zwart Institute, every year again, and only getting worse over time as the country became more and more closed, with the far right dominating its political climate and public discourse long before 2023 when it won the national elections for the first time. 

The joyful and optimistic counterpoint to these miseries was Leslie's bike tour. When I participated in 2004, I had an intuition that it would one day become legendary, part of the sentimental education of generations of Piet Zwart Institute students. To this day, it remains the only common, yet extracurricular, course module of all its master's programs. By now it must have taken place every September for a quarter of a century. It definitely made me - and likely many others - fall in love with Rotterdam and want to stay and work here.

The bike tour takes a whole day, from morning to late afternoon, and involves visiting as many artist-run spaces in the city as possible in that time. In 2004 there must have been more than ten. About fifteen students, Leslie and I cycled in the North, West and South of Rotterdam, most of us on rental bikes from the Central Station, still unsure of the city's streets and bike lanes, many of which dangerously squeezed between parked cars and tram tracks. I remember visiting the spaces Salle de Mains, KunstZuper, Duende, Het Wilde Weten, Stichting B.A.D. and WORM, the latter in its temporary location in the Slaakhuis squat. WORM made a particularly strong impression on me. When I returned to Piet Zwart Institute in 2006, we started to closely collaborate with it, which is another story. Three of the above locations have survived (as of June 2024).

Leslie is a studio artist who studied fine art. She was an integral part of Duende, a now legendary space (which also included, among others, Liesbeth Bik and Jos van der Pol, Jeanne van Heeswijk and Charlemagne Palestine). It closed for good in 2013 having become - like so many others - a victim of city development in a municipality whose master plans used "gentrification" as a positive word, and where it is a policy to sell off publicly owned buildings, like Duende's, to private real estate developers. 

Leslie knew everyone in Rotterdam's art scene at a time when Willem de Kooning Academy seemed disconnected from the city and Piet Zwart Institute only collaborated with its internationally oriented art institutes. In my three-month residency apartment, a cube house on Overblaak owned by the school at the time, my welcome package consisted of a map of Amsterdam. It must have been left there by someone other than Leslie.

Leslie remained the organizational coordinator of our research program until 2011, when Hogeschool Rotterdam restructured its research professorships, clustering them in larger centers. It is strange, but perhaps not without a certain beauty, that in the year that we parted ways (professionally), and Leslie continued to work only for the master's programs, the bike tour ended up giving birth to a new research program.

Originally, our first research professorship was (to paraphrase a little bit) about digital technologies and their cultural and political impact on arts and society. Our second professorship, which started in 2010, was originally called "Cultural Diversity", and brought intersectionality to the art school for the first time. In 2012, Willem de Kooning Academy radically reformed its bachelor curriculum, dedicating half of it to interdisciplinary "Practices" studied by students from all art and design departments. My former research professorship in New Media became one in "Autonomous Practices", the professorship in Cultural Diversity became "Social Practices". Ultimately, both research programs focused on collective, community- and commons-oriented practices in the arts. (The focus on the commons was the umbilical cord to the former New Media research program and its focus on Open Source community practices.)

For the Autonomous Practices curriculum and research program, we decided to focus specifically on self-organization, and on self-organized spaces and initiatives as an art practice in its own right. Between 2017 and 2024, we organized three symposia that directly involved local artist-run spaces and collectives, investigated the conditions for such self-organization, and what a school that teaches collective self-organization rather than individual work portfolio development should look like. On the website www.autonomousfabric.org, we created a topical map of artist-run spaces in Rotterdam, as a direct sibling to Leslie's bike tour. It is now a historical document of spaces most of which shut down during the Covid-19 pandemic and in the housing crisis, with an unprecedented scarcity and cost explosion of housing in Rotterdam that even long-time residents hadn't foreseen. 

During my first bike tour with Leslie in 2004, Rotterdam was the ghetto of the Netherlands, and we joked about the city council's seemingly futile gentrification efforts. They were already materializing in subsidy and zero-rent programs for artists who opened up spaces in run-down neighborhoods, and thus in problematic complicities that often weren't reflected. At the time, I was also struck by how, with few exceptions, most of the art in these spaces was decorative and apolitical, an expression of a still intact social consensus in the Netherlands.

When we organized our last symposium in 2024, only one of the four collectives we had invited - Do-Het-Zelf-Werkplaats - still had its own space, ironically nothing more than a container in a park. Moreover, all the collectives took the concept of "art" much less for granted than the initiatives we had visited twenty years ago.

It seems that with Leslie's retirement, a part of Rotterdam's culture and history is coming to an end. Our WdKA bachelor curriculum and research program on Autonomous and Social Practices will also end next year, at least in its current form. Perhaps this is a good thing, because these twenty years may become, in retrospect, a period in which the difference between art practice (such as that of artist-run studio buildings) and social practice (from squatting to community work) is disappearing, in which communities have become more diasporic and less tied to fixed locations, and in which art schools need to radically rethink what they are and whom they serve, even more radically than twenty years ago when we started research programs biking around the city.

Still, I hope the school can find a way to continue the bike tour - and convince Leslie not to retire completely.