Unnoticed Art Festival 2014

On May 17th and 18th 2014 the first edition of the Unnoticed Art Festival took place in Haarlem, the Netherlands. The festival is a concept of Frans van Lent, a Dutch performance artist, and was about artistic interventions and performances taking place in public space without framing it as art, thus by all probability being ‘unnoticed’. An interesting experiment: how would the public react to art performances and interventions they might not recognise as such? We we’re in for an exiting weekend, that was certain. All the artists invited didn’t knew until the very last moment which city we were heading for. It turned out to be Haarlem, a small city north of Amsterdam.

Our intervention was to leave tiny paper boats amongst the fall-out of our consumer society and other garbage which people tend to leave carelessly behind in cities.

Of course we were amidst a group of inspired and remarkable fellow artists, amongst other Malou van Doormaal who started the festival by shouting once and not uttering another word for the remainder of the festival, only to conclude the festival with another shout.

Marnik Neven pasted blanc paper on a wall in a tunnel underneath the train station.

And Jeroen Jongeleen marked an image with small poles in the grass and started to trace the image by running the alongside the poles to emboss the pattern in the grass, like an elephant trail. Mind you, he needed to run the same distance as a marathon to leave an imprint.