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Material & Reuse

Site-specific urban mining

2025–ongoing
Rotterdam - NL
Self-initiated research

Program: Material research, casting, urban mining
Status: Research / Series

Every renovation and demolition site in Rotterdam produces material. Most of it disappears into bins and into the aggregate chain, losing all connection to its origin: the specific building it came from, the neighbourhood it accumulated in, the particular mixture of stone types, ceramic traditions, and soil conditions that gave it its colour and texture.

Material & reuse is a research series that begins before that disappearance.

The methodology is simple and repeated: identify a site undergoing demolition or renovation, conduct a mining inventory (a careful collection of the material coming out of that address) and use it as the primary aggregate for two types of cast objects: an assemblage piece or a set of tiles, which preserves something of the collected material's character and the site. Each object is indexed to its source address.

The provenance is part of the work.

What accumulates across the series is something between a material library and an urban portrait: a set of objects that carry, in their colour gradients and aggregate compositions, the specific history of particular blocks of the city.

The Vijverhofstraat object contains different material (literally, in its aggregate) than the Heemskerkstraat object, which contains different material than the Heer Bokelweg object...

Rotterdam is not a uniform city; its construction history is patchy, stratified, and geographically specific. The research makes that specificity legible at the scale of a hand-held object.

Materials & potentials

Cement mixes & textures sampling

Shape and aggregates exploration
Assemblage & stratigraphy

Process & output

3038 VL - Heemskerkstraat 121-171
Mining inventory

3032 SB - Vijverhofstraat 23
#1 - Object built from cement, pigments, mined materials
(crushed brick & concrete aggregates, sand, stained & colored glass, wood, ground)

#2 - Tile sampling with cement, pigments & mined materials
(crushed brick & concrete aggregates)

3032AD_Heer Bokelweg 119 <> 171
#1 - Object built from cement, pigments, mined materials
(pebbles, sand & ground)

#2 - tile samples with cement, mined materials and ground
(pebbles, reinforced glass, sand, shells & ground)

#3 - Object built from cement, pigments & mined materials
(pebbles, aggregates)