Where are the likes of Kafka’s Prague, Freud’s City of Dreams or Spiderman’s Manhattan in the City of Architecture? A Manhattan on the Maas suggests a multiverse of mythology behind the one-liner, not just many cities11. For a city so rich in stagesets, Rotterdam still lives under a reign of logic ruled by the sceptre and crown of the rational. But what does the City of Architecture dream about?

The primary vehicle of the INNBETWEEN, “Why Rotterdam”, a hybrid bauzeitung alternative city magazine, interfects the Rotterdam skyline with storytelling from invisible platEAUs in the City of Architecture. For the 12 menstruations of the installation, bi–monthly issues probe, pervert and fertilize interventions through seemingly illogical associations of the prescribed breed12 of cliches because the truth does not conform to convention.

Why Rotterdam is the artistic reconstruction of the diseased facade masking Rotterdam. On the borderline of the real, departing from the familiar, a conspiracy against cliche, the magazine is a collage of scenarios, other cities tattooed into the tissue of the City of Architecture. The in-gredients required for this diversity salad lie distilling all around us, in Rotterdam and abroad. Similar to what Morgan Russell told us about the short-lived technosurrealist phenomena of MONDO 2000 (San Francisco 88-93), where the psychedelic met cybernetic, where the literary juxtaposed political, the choice of ingredients is as important as how they are put together13. Innbetween Dutch English German and MERZ (Hannover 1923-?), it is a tool to facilitate collisions between the insular cubes of authors and authorities. Innquistions torture the Right People with Right Questions beyond their social-professional armour.

In the City of Architecture, there is no architecture sub-culture. 40 years ago, Archigram magazine released an(other) critical stream of consciousness into the world, revealing the juxtaposition of architecture to the socio-political conditions and the revolutions in knowledge that were occurring. The international architecture monolith to-date assimilated the formal metaphors and typo-graphic rendering styles, but the inherent political dimension is left unquestioned. Similar to Archigram, Why Rotteram is not of the future but of the NOW. In the City of Architecture, simul-taneously the voice of the other must come from INSIDE while escaping it’s own exclusive cannibalism. Why Rotterdam is as ambiguous and multiple as Mediatecture once hoped to be. In the hypocritical epoch of mobility, there are no shopping malls for Metabolists14.

Beyond synaesthesia, the Why magazine reflects and stimulates “factions” and scenarios in other experimental laboratories. Again, to interfect the cultural climate, chemical overlaps with other individuals and groups enable storytelling and episodes on stagesets as multiple as the media. In this case, the Why Rotterdam city magazine with corresponding factions, function as appliances for vacuuming, blending and circulating knowledge.

Rotterdam needs a mythology.

It is out there.

11. Rotterdam 2001 Slogan

12. David Cronenberg: The Breed

13. Sermon by Ulf Hallwaxx

14. Room 17c: everything by me.