Klaartje van Essen, Phantom, photo: Natascha Libbert

Phantom emerges in the urban landscape like a ghostly apparition in the form of a house. Constructed from scaffolding netting, the work resembles a memory in the making - an image drawn from imagination that attempts to take a fixed form, yet remains suspended between idea (the intangible) and solid brick. What does it mean when an image of a dream or memory can no longer take a stable form? When a home has become an unattainable ideal for many, or a distant, repressed memory? What traces do the spaces we inhabit leave in our memory, and what spaces do we long for?

Artist Klaartje van Essen lives in a communal housing group on Weteringschans. Daily life there is continuously shaped by shared agreements and care. Van Essen looks out from her home in a housing collective onto this empty plot: a “gap” in the city, created by demolition and awaiting new development.

Within this gap she develops Phantom, a temporary artwork.

Phantom is a spatial collage in which elements from different existing and imagined houses come together. Everyday details such as bricks or a rainpipe function as points of recognition. By bringing these fragments to the foreground, Van Essen reveals not only a dream or ideal, but also the everyday reality of our built environment.

Here, the house appears as a fragile form: at once a place of shelter and part of larger movements within the city.

In a time of social, ecological and political shifts, Phantom reflects on the house as a changing idea: not only as a building, but also as desire, memory, and the way space is distributed in the city.

streetview with Phantom

More about the artist
Klaartje van Essen is an artist whose sculptures and drawings explore an ongoing process of material transformation. Rooted in everyday observations, her work engages with the shifting relationship between matter and its surroundings. Following a residency at De Ateliers in Amsterdam (2023–2024), her work has been presented at the Cobra Museum in Amstelveen, Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst in Bremen, and in the polder landscape of Flevoland alongside Riff PD#18245, commissioned by Jij bent M.

Photo: Wilke Geurds // @wilkegeurds_beeldverhalen