what's a Moulin for?
What on earth did we think we were going to do at and with and for the Moulin du Merle when we fell in love with this place late July 1998? As much as we had it all planned before we moved here 31 March 1999, as little today these plans seem to be what this place is about.
Our first ideas clearly emerged from our then practices and environment, the cultural circles of Amsterdam, living in a loft on the waterfront in the east center part. Like is witnessed in NQPaOFU issue 5 which reads at the time, August 1998:
Moving there yet is a radical break from where your reputation is, where your income is and where you know the rules. Of course you will try to stay connected, bring the rules and opportunities, get the friends over and generally give the place a purpose to improve your own life and that of anybody who joins you. That's the easy part. The break is the hard part. A break for the better: for a continuation of what has been achieved, a re-evaluation of the best that happened, for the cause of the best to happen. You don't want to break up for insecurity. At this stage of life. But you need experimentation. What we fear most probably is isolation, or going to a place where no one will follow, thus not generating any impact on developments we have been co-leading for the past 20 years. You want to stay in touch and drive changes for more people than yourselves.
That's rather idealistic and sort of apologetic at the same time. Meanwhile we found that we primarily moved here to go here, be here, live here, work here. Of course some links stay and others get lost. Rather than forcing some kind of plan on the Moulin, we courted it over the past almost three years, only now to begin to understand what keeps us here and what we might mean here—having experienced its life, having chosen to a certain extent, to be informed by it, before too much wanting to inform/reform it. We have been its guests and decided to stay.
Meanwhile, 'what's the Moulin for' still is a good question. Some of that question we hope to answer here, as we describe and speculate on its competences and affordances, for ourselves and for old and new friends, since we made many. The other half of the answer is in how we live it, in its situated everyday.
[JJK]
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