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Salim Bayri, Nucleus, photo: Natascha Libbert
A lightbox is mounted on the façade of the home of artist Salim Bayri, recalling the changing price signs at gas stations. Three values continuously update. They appear precise and urgent, yet can also feel arbitrary or absurd. Some seem meaningful, others almost empty. What exactly they refer to remains deliberately open.
The starting point of this work is close to home. While searching for a house Bayri noticed how housing is increasingly described through numbers —prices, market values, returns—rather than as a lived, social space. A home becomes less about living, and more about calculation. In Nucleus, this shift becomes visible.
Amid the housing crisis in the Netherlands, numbers can produce a contradictory effect. They can feel overwhelming, while at the same time offering a sense of overview or control. Housing is increasingly understood through figures and measurements, as if complex social realities become manageable once they can be calculated—an idea that echoes the Dutch tradition of the maakbare samenleving.
Nucleus refers to systems organized around a core: an egg, a house, and nuclear energy. These are structures that sustain life, value, or control, but can also become unstable when their center comes under pressure. From this perspective, the work connects the scale of a single home to larger economic, biological, and technological systems.
streetview with Nucleus, photo: Natascha Libbert
More information about the artist
Bayri’s practice moves between digital and physical gestures, where images, languages, and situations continuously shift and collide. This reflects his fascination with the code-switching nature of his mother tongue, Moroccan Darija. He is a recipient of the Volkskrant Visual Arts Prize and is based in Amsterdam.
More about the numbers:
Average size of an egg: Based on measurements from chicken eggs. The number fluctuates very fast because of the large quantity of eggs produced and eaten a day. It is fairly stable because of stantardization.
Empty houses in amsterdam: Based on data provided by the CBS (Cetral Bureau of Statistics) on a report about vacant housing in the Netherlands (LINK) and used for this article, I projected this value in the future based on regulations such as the leegstandsheffing (tax on vacancy) and the pied-à-terre vergunning (permit) that are meant to pull the numbers down. Other predictions such as the summer season and the overall shortage of housing pull this number up. The number shown in Nucleus is a approximative yet very lively number. Good to know that the number includes long term such as abandoned buildings and short term vacancy such as for renovations or gaps between tenants.
Nuclear weapons stationed in this country now: the Dutch government officially maintains a policy of "neither confirming nor denying" but there is enough information to say that between 10 and 20 stationed at the Volkel Air Base from a Dutch-USA agreement. The weapons belong entirely to the United States and their handling and protection is given to the dutch army.
The three values update at different speeds. The first very fast, the second slower and the last is almost still. It starts from the biological and domestic scale of an egg, to the scale of a city, to the potential survival of a civilisation.
