Bring Your Own Bike #02
Waalhaven, Rotterdam
- Weather
- Performance
- Bring Your Own Bike
Edition 02
Beyond the Boxes: Tracing the Erasure of Lives
8 June 2024
Waalhaven → Pernis,
Rotterdam, NL
10:30-15:00
12km
18°C
Light Wind, NW 10 mph
Humidity: 68%
Air quality: Fair
Conceived within Varia's programme Colonial Infrastructures: on Containerisation and developed with artists Amy Pickles and Czarina Calinawagan, this ride set out from south Rotterdam into the container terminals of Waalhaven, where boxes stacked several storeys high form continuous steel walls. It ended in Pernis, a village of around five thousand people enclosed by Europe's largest Shell refinery.
Looking past cargo and throughput figures, the ride asked whose lives go missing in a port that counts everything in container units. Czarina's work, which traces the letters her father sent home during his years on container ships, gave the route another layer: the container appeared less as a box for goods than as a device that folds individual lives into the scale of a global system.
BYOB (Bring Your Own Bike) is a participatory cycling performance series that explores polluted weather as a collective, embodied phenomenon. Participants ride their own bikes through polluted industrial areas, weathering together under the artist's guidance.
Here the bike is a speculative tool that turns the body into a sensing instrument, tuned to headwind, exhaust, and the smell of oil rising off water. Each pedal stroke is a small negotiation with the air itself, part of a communal practice where environment, socio-political climate, and the human body meet.
The performance has taken place at industrial sites across Europe and South Korea, including ports, refineries, and energy infrastructure. Each ride is shaped by the uneven atmosphere and politics of its location: who breathes what, and where, and who is even allowed to get close enough to ask.
Participating Cyclists
Amy Pickles · Cristina Cochior · Czarina Calinawagan · Dafni Melidou · 4 Varia Members
Collaboration
Amy Pickles · Czarina Calinawagan
Photography
Various Varia Members
