(NL) Bas Princen graduated from the Eindhoven Academy of Design in 1998, attended the Berlage Institute in 1999 and founded TJJLP Designers in Rotterdam in 2000. He has never really designed housing. He can only really be regarded as an architect in this field if we consider housing as an object, a thing that can be purchased or acquired. His work can nevertheless be regarded as having to do with the subject, if we regard ways of living in inhabited places, and the spontaneous appropriation of abandoned spaces and plots of land without any specific function as both architecture and urban development. Bas Princen's photos show us bits of landscape, not as an illustration of reality but as images of a potential reality to do with this landscape. They are often places which are first overlooked, and only subsequently start to trouble us; they are too abandoned for us to consider them as part of nature, whose initial function we forgot a long time ago, even if they have retained traces of it. What interests Bas Princen, and what he photographs, is when the spontaneous appropriation of these places and of the signs of activities which have fashioned them, reveals them in their real nature, and restores a new reality to them. It is the changes in the landscape which, through new uses, acquire a different meaning.

Bas Princen
Princen (Bas) (1975)
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• Mutating Landscape photos, 1999-2000