Shared Grounds - Life at the industrial edge

Shared Grounds - Life at the industrial edge explores Ruigoord, a cultural free space in Amsterdam, its history, coexistence with surrounding industry, and how the community preserves its culture and identity within industrial pressure.

Hundreds of gasoline tanks, industry pipes and a haze of smoke from the chimneys fill the view on my twenty minute bus ride from Amsterdam Sloterdijk to the final stop at Ruigoord. Every time I take this route, it feels surreal to get off the bus in the middle of an industrial area and step into a cultural free space - a place where industry dominates and has forced the community to reshape itself multiple times throughout history, first as a small island village whose residents were bought out and streets buried under sand, then squatted by artists in the 1970s, and now a cultural free space.

For more than fifty years, Ruigoord has been a place where people are connected with the land - the oldest cultural free space in The Netherlands. This oasis, set in the middle of the harbour and surrounded by massive gasoline tanks, makes it odd. It raises the question of what it means to coexist with industry, and how a community can continue to preserve itself within it.

Through portraits and encounters with people from the community, I explore how Ruigoord continues to coexist with the surrounding industry.