All that (Alles wat – 4 parts)

About this artwork.

In Akerkstraat, Schoolstraat, Grote Kromme Elleboog and Nieuwstad, words could be found on curbs that together form a text: All that/is holy/must/have a fixed place. 

The client, Stichting De Zaak, an artists' initiative founded in 1979 by Jouke Kleerebezem, Ton Mars and Hans Scholten, commissioned artist Harry Vandevliet to create a piece of art in 1982. Initially to go in De Zaak's own atelier, but instead of inside, the artist proposed using the city as an atelier. And so Vandevliet engraved the chosen words in situ in existing bluestone curbs scattered over a number of streets. 
The text is a bastardised version of a statement by a medicine man from Papua New Guinea (all that is holy has its fixed place) from the book The Savage Mind by the anthropologist Claude Lévi- Strauss. “This bastardised statement touched me,” said Vandevliet.

Harry Vandevliet regarded his act, engraving text in kerbstones, as a kind of ennobled graffiti that will disappear with the changing environment; urban renewal, widening of streets and replacement of hard stones with concrete kerbstones. And so it went; nowadays there are still three parts present in the public space.

Facts & Figures.

• Design
  Harry Vandevliet

• District
  Centrum

• Year of creation
  1982

• Art type
  Art in the road surface, floor or ground

• Material
  Natural stone