Ellen Kooi Above Rotterdam

High above the streets of Rotterdam, on cold winter nights, during early spring evenings, and dusky autumn days; five situations were staged and captured by artist Ellen Kooi, inside the B' Tower in Rotterdam, by architect Wiel Arets. Nearly each apartment is identical, which lends a receded repetition to the ‘stage sets’ Kooi created, in the tradition of her renowned landscape photography. In Kooi’s ‘sets’, a sleeping young girl cuddles with whimsical Weimaraners; a lonely business man digitally pines for his distant love; a young couple saunters and seduces one another, inside and out; an informal dinner gathering morphs into an impromptu musical; a mother creates a dream world for her and her children, high above Rotterdam’s streets. Interspersed throughout Kooi's sets of imagery are separately created scenes of poetry and prose, by artist Katrien Van den Brande, which alternate with Kooi's narratives–all graphically woven together by a design from Mainstudio. This publication is a two-dimensional immersion into a parallel urban reality, that’s at once fantasy and fiction–yet remarkably familiar.