The Bijlmermeerpolder is still known as a district where you don't go unless something or someone forces you to. A stigma the apartment neighbourhood acquired in the 1980s when it served as a drain on society. And still its reputation is bad. A single incident of violence repeatedly damages the entire district, even though it is so large and diverse. In fact, more people live there than in the entire province of Zeeland. And everything in the district, the many green spaces, the fine shopping centres, the music, the spacious houses, tells a different story from that of no-go-zone.
I went there on Saturday 1 June for Parliament Debout, a project by Congolese artist Faustin Linyekula, who this year associate artist is from the Holland Festival. Parliament Debout is intended as an ode to the unknown and untold stories of a city. Linyekula saw the Bijlmer during his introductory tour of Amsterdam and knew that here, in this not exactly white neighbourhood, he had the perfect place for his street corner parliament. So he sought out people and their stories, only to show them to the Holland Festival audience.
Local audience
So there we stood, in the backyard of Streetcornerwork Southeast, being very white and middle-aged, feasting our eyes on people with a different skin colour and a different standard of living than us. From the houses around the courtyard, there was hardly any attention to us or the musicians and dancers of Studios Kabako. Then came local drummers and we went on a tour of the neighbourhood, where we were provided with the necessary content by a spoken word artist, who was not from the neighbourhood himself but had good storytelling skills.
There was dancing, there were singers, there were thankfully a bit more local audiences and, towards the end, there was the stop and minute's silence around the tree that saw it all: the monument to the 1992 Bijlmer disaster, when a Boeing 747 destroyed a flat, dozens of lives and the last vestige of self-confidence in the neighbourhood.
Vanguard
That self-confidence of the Bijlmer is in good shape almost 30 years after that disaster. Much has changed: Amsterdam Southeast is even cautiously beginning to gentrify. That veryupping is almost inevitable, and we, that little motley procession of lovers of the high arts, were the vanguard this Saturday afternoon. No wonder not the whole neighbourhood turned out for our parade. Afterwards, there was no white wine and bitterballen, but shaved ice and things from the grill, under umbrellas and under the metro line to Ganzenhoef Station, once one of the Bijlmer's most dangerous spots, now rising as an impressive monument of modernity.
'Oerol,' muttered one of the few non-white visitors later, at Amstel station, and he did not mean that in a positive way. We have quite a gap to bridge, all of us.
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