Make it happen

The Gerard Scholtenstraat is a street of Rotterdam located
in the old North district (Oude Norden). It well represents the atmosphere of the neighborhood, whose the population is a mix between artists, students and low incomes people, sharing one of the last former area of Rotterdam : bricks, surrounding the space, give a really typical and authentic atmosphere.

All the members of the V2012 association are artists, architects, designers, writers etc, living in this street.
In 1997, they decided to create this association in order to save a couple of houses of Gerard Scholtenstraat which were about to be destroyed by the city council. This project has been a full success. The energy of the association is legible on all those houses which are now inhabited by them : each front facade is painted with flashy colors. When we discovered this street, the Jacques Prevert poem "The dunce" resounded in our heads : we really liked the positive, colourful and energizing message this action communicates, and we decided to try spreading it besides the street. It's for us a good exemple of how to change and readapt a street in a better place of living. The colour wich is a really simple media
can be enough to give a new impulse to an area.
That's what we want to communicate.

We decided to contact the members of the association in
order to get further informations, pictures, testimonies and
any kind of document wich could help us do understand and illustrate their projects and actions. The first part of the project could be a small newspaper showing how we took contact with the association to make understand the pace, and then what we 'll be able to collect thanks to the meetings with the members. Then we planned to create a colourful paper "module" out of the bricks shape, which is for us well representative of the city of Rotterdam.

With this module, we would want to create a colourful and joyful event in the street, designing a typeface out of it and writing several sentences in the street walls, in addition to the action of painting houses. We were thinking about sentences like "Make it happen" or extracts from the Jacques Prevert 's poem "Le cancre"...