What is visually left behind by people when they have gone? Deserted places lose their initial purpose and are taken over by new purposes, whether these are created by humans or nature. For Heidi these places have become the heart of her art practice. Her work always reacts to environments as she researches their time layers. The recapturing of autonomy by places she finds more interesting than the worked out plans governments put onto them. Heidi sometimes facilitates these new purposes herself, but other times they have already come to be and she only wishes to make them clearer and give more space to them.

This sounds like something a curator would do, but Heidi does not see herself as one who works in a white cube. She rather looks at spaces as potential artworks and wonders how this artwork can be fully experienced and the surrounding sphere can be enlarged. She combines and contrasts towards a scenography and treats installations as interventions. Her role of curator and artist interweaves with that of artist educator; someone who makes you experience surroundings from another point of view. Surroundings become autonomous – even spiritual - beings and Heidi wants to make people curious for these beings that have a story to tell.

“I often feel a certain sphere in a space that appeals to me, but I have come to realize that a general audience does not feel the same by itself. What I try to do as an artist is make an intervention in that space in which they can experience the same, without that experience being the only possible feeling to have. I am always curious whether I can make tangible for others what I feel in such a space.”

Heidi frequently makes a space within an already existing space. Invitations for this are her scale models. These ‘potentially-executed-spaces’ create a symbolic space for Heidi to move and create freely, without restrictions of safety-measurements or other construction rules. If plans for a large scale object are carried out, she prefers to make something vulnerable. A private terrain is the best choice for such a risky and breakable project, since there are not as many building requirements. However, Heidi also likes her sculptures to be free to use. She tells me about the feeling of looking into a deserted shop window and imagining herself to be inside. That is what she likes her audience to experience, with the opportunity to move freely and without prescriptions of how to behave. That is how her work is radically different from that of architects, where everything must have a purpose.

Another point at which Heidi sometimes thinks differently from classical art galleries is that she likes her work to slowly change overtime and let the environment react to her materials. The mystic and allure of places visibly comes to live then. Overall Heidi thinks reality can be stranger than fiction, where something has happened that no one could make up. She is curious and likes to dig deeper into these kinds of stories, by asking about them to local residents. Some stories that are hidden only in people’s minds are also very intimate. Heidi tells about interviews she had with a Jewish family that had to hide during World War II and her careful questions to them. Heidi thus both is attracted to deserted and silent spaces, as well as people’s personal stories.

“The people who have used the place and have left it like that can indicate to me the feeling I have there, the secret of the place as it were. Of course I do not know this secret, but by talking to those people I discover the stories of the place and then I understand what has been there. They show me the place as it was thirty years ago, for example.”

But how do the concrete outcome of her research reach an audience? Firstly, Heidi does not want to hand over a clear message, but strives to leave room open for the unexpected and for autonomous choices. Sometimes she invites audiences to a quiet space, like she did during the Ijsselbiënnale. The dark beech road with a dead end was not a place at which large amounts of people came to gather, Heidi wanted a handful of people to experience the objects she placed there and the characteristics of silence and darkness. She also tells me about a work she is busy with right now; a building at an estate that is becoming ‘ugly’. It is a resemblance of one of the artifacts she found nearby of a deserted army defense base and the only way to make it look right was to make it look not right.

Alongside the visual work, there are never text signs with descriptions or explanations of her work. Heidi does not want to make things too clear, because it takes away curiosity. On the other side there should be an opening for people to come closer, they have to be invited in some way. There is a constant balance to be found here, since the audience needs to have full freedom to look at things in other ways.

“I am always looking for the balance between evoking curiosity and too much explanation. I think the spectator should have complete freedom to see something very different. Otherwise it would not be art anymore I think, rather design or an educational project. My works are at that cutting edge, but I try to look for ways in which you can learn and experience in a different way than through text or known ways. And I think curiosity is the most important factor there.”

During her Rizoom takeover, Heidi will show images of what she is working on right now, as well as projects she has made in the past and her scale models. There will be an interplay between big and small ideas.