Staging the City’s Voids

Daan Russcher received a grant for the development of new work. In Staging the City’s Voids, he explores how the layered complexity and hidden beauty of the city’s margins can be transformed into physical, walkable experiences. While the city centre presents itself as a constructed stage set of polished façades, this image gradually begins to crumble at the edges. In these spaces, often merely passed through, a raw reality emerges: peeling paint, rusting steel structures and weathered concrete. In this project, Daan translates photographic prints of worn urban surfaces into spatial stage elements: freestanding, layered constructions of steel and dibond that invite viewers to move around and through them. He creates a diorama that presents the city not as a static whole, but as a dynamic landscape marked by traces of time and use. His work pays tribute to the unfinished and explores the boundary between photography and sculpture.

Daan works through a form of reverse architecture, moving between the roles of artist and architect. He photographs existing structures, crops fragments from them, and reshapes these like a sculptor into new spatial forms. The result is a body of work that merges installation, photography and sculpture. Where architecture often strives for perfection, control and refinement, he focuses on the places where this image begins to fracture: the city’s edges, infrastructural zones and viaducts, spaces designed to function, yet rarely appreciated for their aesthetic qualities. Daan reveals how the city, as a carefully constructed stage set, starts to unravel at its margins. He exposes the façade of the planned city and demonstrates that beauty can reside in the unfinished, the failed and the imperfect. Through his work, he seeks to honour these overlooked areas and make their often unnoticed beauty visible.