Without meeting Harmen de Hoop and Biancoshock will give eachother assignments to make an artwork in the city where they currently are.
Every work will be a reaction to the one made before by the other artist. The documentation of their interventions and actions will be shown here.
26.08.2025 BIANCOSHOCK GAVE HARMEN DE HOOP AN ASSIGNMENT: GIVE SOMETHING AWAY FOR FREE.
HARMEN DE HOOP: FOR FREE - OLTEN, 2025
Harmen de Hoop deposited his hefty 2,5 kg book in an outdoor book exchange in Olten.
About the book:
Good news for anyone who was up till now unfamiliar with the works of Harmen de Hoop. For the first time, his work - which is the result of many years of feverish production - will be shown in a voluminous book. With much humour and irony, he makes us observe public space in a different way, giving it his own special twist.
De Hoop has an extreme talent for destabilising the ordinary. And due to the nature and scale of this book, he managed to do that perfectly again.
(Erik Kessels)
15.06.2025 HARMEN DE HOOP GAVE BIANCOSHOCK AN ASSIGNMENT: MAKE A WORK ABOUT COMMUNICATING.
BIANCOSHOCK: THE SIM POEM - SARAJEVO, 2025
In Bosnia, for those coming from outside the Balkan region, roaming charges is extremely high - up to 1,99€ per just 1MB of data. As a result, tourists are forced to purchase local prepaid SIM to have affordable prices. This system has created a massive flow of disposable SIMs, thousands of temporary and impersonal numbers used for just few days and then discarded. Starting from this, Biancoshock tried to give value and continuity to the "life" of a SIM card, transforming it into a conceptual artwork. During his stay in Bosnia, he purchased a 10GB SIM number. Before leaving the country, he decided to gift it to a random tourist - with 6,3 GB of data still available. But he went further: he sought to turn this gesture into a work of art.
Using the SIM's phonebook - the only tool that allows visible information to be transferred when a prepaid SIM passed from one phone to another - he saved a series of contacts with fake names which, when read in alphabetical order, form a contemporary poem written by the artist.
SIM TWO
All voices meet
creating bonds
forming links
linking lives.
Open minds hear
poor words and
reach their own
silent verdict.
Talk teach and
unite our souls.
Voices find us,
words heal us.
On the day of his departure, Biancoshock left a "kit" attached to a wall in the city centre. The kit contained a document explaining the project, the physical SIM card complete with the PIN and PUK, and the user instructions. Within the document the artist invited the future owner to contact him via WhatsApp to receive the certificate of authenticity: the final contact saved in the phonebook included the artist's phone number. In this way, the project entrusted the finder with the responsability of choosing wheter to recognize the SIM as an artwork, or simply use it and discard it or pass it on to another tourist.
A few days later, Biancoshock was contacted on Instagram by Klara, a German traveler who had found the card and chose to keep it as an artwork.
Thanks to her participation, Klara now holds the world's first poem written on a SIM card.
28.05.2025 BIANCOSHOCK GAVE HARMEN DE HOOP AN ASSIGNMENT: MAKE A WORK ABOUT THE PAST.
HARMEN DE HOOP: PUBLIC TELEPHONE - OBERGÖSGEN, 2025
Harmen de Hoop installed a telephone in a bus stop in Obergösgen.
03.04.2025 HARMEN DE HOOP GAVE BIANCOSHOCK AN ASSIGNMENT: MAKE A WORK ABOUT LIFE AND DEATH.
BIANCOSHOCK: SOMEONE - LODI, 2025
In an abandoned school, hundreds of old metal nameplates were found - once simple tools for student identification. The enrollment dates reveal that these students were born in the early 1900s. Biancoshock used some of them to compose the word SOMEONE.
SOME speaks of life. It's built from the tangible presence of the nameplates: metal, real names, personal stories lived alongside others. SOME represents the multitude, the society. Human life is a shared experience in which we are born into a community and grow up among others, forming relationships.
ONE emerges from emptiness. Here, there is no material - only absence. ONE is the invidual. If life is sharing, death is separation: we live together, we always die alone. It's an intimate, unrepeatable passage.
SOMEONE is the synthesis of these two essential dimensions: the multitude that inhabits life and the solitude that defines death. Each "someone" is a specific existence, with a name and a story. Someone who was part of a collective but who - like everyone - faced the final moment alone. What remains is a trace: what they were, what they did and what they left.
Photo credit: Marcella Milani
26.03.2025 BIANCOSHOCK GAVE HARMEN DE HOOP AN ASSIGNMENT: MAKE A WORK ABOUT WAR.
HARMEN DE HOOP: THE UNITED NATIONS - OLTEN, 2025
Do the United Nations fight for freedom? With tanks, ships and airplanes, like on the 1943 poster by Leslie Ragan? But the United Nations have been unable to prevent Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the ongoing genocide in Gaza. If they are powerless, who will fight for our freedom?
15.01.2025 HARMEN DE HOOP GAVE BIANCOSHOCK AN ASSIGNMENT: MAKE A WORK ABOUT SOMEONE WHO DIED.
