Note by Ief Spincemaille on ROPE :
” ROPE is a spatial intervention creating poetical spaces. It’s 100 meters long and 25 cm wide. It consists of an outer shell similar to the ropes used on offshore drilling platforms, only its core is different, its filled with foam to keep it lightweight. The rope itself weighs 2 kg per meter. It takes 30 people to move it.
ROPE can be used by participants as a social instrument to solve a specific problem in a particular neighborhood or district. It can also simply be used as a physical tool to fix, fence or hold. ROPE can be an economic instrument for the promotion of a product or a company. It can also be an artistic/theatrical tool to connect your home with the neighbor’s, and his neighbor, and their neighbor…. It can be an architectural instrument to construct a wall or a pavilion. One can play an XXL game of tug-of-war; or thirty men can carry it on a train to Brussels to disrupt the established order. Perhaps it can even be used as a political instrument to stabilize power relations.
ROPE seeks interactions with other people and places with their own values, dreams and purposes. Every community, individual, or organization is a potential user of this instrument, as long as the goals are ethically correct. ROPE is a radically democratic instrument. An uninterested outsider who is not limited by existing protocols. With ROPE I enter other arenas with the will to generate change.
ROPE is an attempt to create an artistic practice that deals with more than solely esthetic questions and values. I call this a multi-valued approach. A practice which links individual expression to a broader (social/economical/ecological/scientific/…) relevance and interest. ROPE wants to explore the possibilities and impossibilities of real social change by means of an artistic instrument. And this by just trying to realize change at the level of an individual, a street, a neighborhood or a city … Now! “