Hans van Houwelingen

Instead of exhibiting in galleries and museums, Hans van Houwelingen prefers to site his art in the middle of society - on squares and streets or attached to buildings. Art is able to bring a different atmosphere to such places, providing an anchoring point for creating a community, he finds. Take Lelystad, a city without a centre - until Van Houwelingen placed an absurdly tall column on a square with a statue of engineer Lely on top of it. Now there are people sitting on benches and the city has a face.

In Sonsbeek Park a monument was erected in 1931 to Hendrik Lorentz (1853-1928), one of Holland’s greatest physicists and winner of the Nobel Prize in 1902. Lorentz did research into elementary particles and established the basis for the relativity theory of his pupil Einstein. Now, a century later, the very latest particle accelerator is being employed in Geneva in order to round off the theory of elementary particles.

Van Houwelingen has updated Lorentz’s monument for Sonsbeek 2008. To the six names of great physicists that were already carved into the stone next to Lorentz’s likeness, he is having an extra one added each day during the three months of the Sonsbeek exhibition. In this way he is suggesting that Lorentz’s genius did not stand alone and that the increasingly complex laws of our material reality can now only be written by collaborating brains. Lorentz’s greatness is in the meantime spread among many people.

Panels bearing the names of these scientists were carried in the Procession by Guild of Scientists.