Ik was je even vergeten

As long as cities have had a history, suburbs have had an important part to play in its writing. From the Latin "suburbium," formed from "sub," meaning "under," and "urbis," meaning "wall" or "walled city," the suburbs have been crucial to the life of the polis. And yet, as the very etymology of its denomination foreshadows -describing the suburbs as being situated "under" the city and its walls- suburbs do not quite inspire the same ideas and feelings as one speaks out words such as "city" or "center." In our collective imaginary, suburbs are relegated to a shadowy secondary place and one forgets that once the centers of today's cities were the outskirts in their original configurations. For in fact, suburbs are cities in the margins and cities' doppelgangers. In other words, suburbs and their history stand for cities' figures of alterity. Suburbs mirror and distort cities' history: they are cities' Others.

 With her series Ik was je even vergeten, for which she systematically visited each and every neighborhood that constitutes the outskirts of the Dutch city of Utrecht, Judith van IJken fills in a gap -that of providing contemporary suburbs with representations of themselves. For in fact, very few images of these places circulate or are even being produced. These important areas of social life -they all together in Utrecht welcome the housing of some 80% of the population-do not actually form part of our collective memory. It is interesting to formulate this latent contradiction in more concrete terms: suburbs constitute crucial public spaces while not being symbolically allowed to permeate the public sphere. With the wish to counter this state of things and give public visibility to these neighborhoods, Judith van IJken both records and gives personal expression to their specificity. And, just as the idea of photographing these places aims at telling the story of an architectural minority, which marks the collective imaginary by its very absence, Judith van IJken helps mapping the history of its inhabitants by de-territorializing them from her visual vocabulary. Objects and their disposition, houses, parkways, gardens and their ornamental plants, spaces and their configurations speak about the identity of their absent settlers. According to Van Ijken, her landscapes are rather portraits than topological maps. They suggest the actions and habits that have led to what she ultimately photographs and that characterize their performers. Van Ijken believes in the defining character of processes and their impact on our environment. For, as much as Van IJken's work is in part documentary, it also echoes the old romantic trope of the landscape as projection screen and mirror of a character's inner world. Therefore it might also have been the reason for Van Ijken to have chosen one particular fragment -specifically framed and depicted-to characterize the neighborhood as a whole, which presence is allowed through the photographs' captions. What we are allowed to see from the suburbs of, for instance, Ondiep and Lombok translates Van IJken's specific experiences of the various neighborhoods. And ultimately one can apprehend her work equally as documentary depiction as pictorial depictions that turn the photograph into an abstract play of lines and colors.

 There lies the interest of Ik was je even vergeten: to provide all together a personal, historical and aesthetical representation of a phenomenon of social, architectural and political dimensions. And this somehow allows Van IJken to cover a status that could be called photographe de la vie moderne in remembrance of Baudelaires' qualification that fitted the profile of painters who, in the 19th century, had also striven to portray the life of outer cities, the Impressionists. Maybe will one day Van IJken's depictions equal their depictions in their evocative power of an idealized past and thereby provide the aura of greatness of which contemporary suburbs are today deprived.

Catherine Somze