Rock Strangers Oostende & My Secret Garden: Arne Quinze: My Secret Garden & Rock Strangers - Hardcover

Artist Arne Quinze’s installation, My Secret Garden, encourages visitors to explore their own mental place where they keep their most personal thoughts, memories, desires and secrets. My Secret Garden is complementary to his other work, Rock Strangers, on the coastline in Ostend, which is a public confrontation with alienation in the centre of the city. Quinze invited Belgian author Saskia de Coster to capture the alienation which the Rock Strangers exude, as well as the intimacy of My Secret Garden (exhibited at Kunsthal Rotterdam) in contemporary stories and distinctive film footage as the projects were running at the same time. The documentaries are explorations of both projects, through interviews about Quinze’s work, unique footage of the making of the installations and ‘uncanny’ performances. The outcome is a quest for the traces of these works in each and every one of us. The complete box contains two book publications, two documentaries (DVDs) in four languages: Dutch, French, English and German.

Arne Quinze (1971): Arne Quinze was born in Belgium and lives and works in Sint-Martens-Latem, Belgium. In the eighties he began working as a graffiti artist but he never finished an official art education. Quinze creates large and small sculptures, drawings, paintings, and large-scale installations. Smaller works, sketches, and drawings are the basis and research for his large installations. Recurring fundamentals in his oeuvre are the use of multiple types of wood, including salvaged wood; electrical colors in fluorescent paint; and themes referring to social interaction, communication, and urbanism. Since a while he's doing research towards large steel installations. Saskia de Coster (1976): After her studies at the University of Leuven (Germanic Languages) and Vancouver (Literature Theory) she became a fulltime writer. Her debut novel Vrije Val (Free Falling) was published in 2002 by the renowned Amsterdam-based publishing house Prometheus, as were her four consecutive novels. Her novels have won the Cutting Edge Award and have been nominated for the BNG-Literature Award, the Gouden Uil and the AKO literature prize. Her work has been translated into seven languages. De Coster is also known to collaborate with artists from various fields. For theatre company STAN she wrote the piece "Eskimo". Before, she collaborated with experimental theatre company Crew. De Coster publishes articles, short stories and columns in several newspapers and magazines such as NRC Handelsblad, Vrij Nederland, Volkskrant, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Le Soir, Humo. She is a columnist for the Flemish newspaper De Morgen. Furthermore, de Coster has just completed working on and playing in her own short film made in close collaboration with photographer Johan Jacobs and with a soundtrack by Ozark Henry.