Forgotten Spaces/Hidden Places–The Photogrammetry of Spatial Experience

Ricky Rijkenberg is an Amsterdam-based artist who positions her work in the space between architecture and its photographic image. Having trained as an architect and working in the field of visual arts, Rijkenberg examines how we locate our understanding of space between what exists and what is imagined.

While working on her MA at the Academy of Architecture in Amsterdam, Rijkenberg discovered a system of hybrid bunkers called Flaktürme (Flak Towers). Built in Vienna in the 1940s, these gigantic blockhouse towers for anti-aircraft artillery symbolise the Third Reich’s megalomania and might and were also a place of refuge for thousands of Vienna’s inhabitants.

Rijkenberg’s photographs of several abandoned buildings that were either forgotten or ‘contaminated’ by their past capture a sense of spatial ambiguity. Recalling her encounters with these spaces through architectural drawings and scale models allows Rijkenberg to translate her spatial experience into new images and imagine new spaces.

Forgotten Spaces/Hidden Places – The Photogrammetry of Spatial Experience shows a pair of photographs and 50 postcards presented as ‘spatial narratives’ documenting Rijkenberg’s research into real and imagined space. However, lingering within these images are traces of something else: seemingly untold stories, forgotten narratives absorbed by the interplay of light and shadow, and experiences hidden in the space just beyond the frame.

Special thanks to Rosa te Velde, Sander Vedder, Gus Tielens, Anna Fink, Ariane James, Merijn van Wouden, Jo Barnett, Franziska Loeding, Carsten Klein, Mirka Mertens, Arna Mackic, Thijs de Zeeuw, Niklas Mayr, and Tineke Blok.