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1033 RC Amsterdam
Netherlands

+31 (0)20 2629913

Beautiful Distress was founded on the concept that there is a great deal of mental suffering, that not enough people are aware of this and that not enough is done to stop it.

The Foundation uses art in an attempt to open up the world of psychiatry and battle the stigma attached to it.

Why art? Beautiful Distress believes that art is pre-eminently capable of articulating and depicting the human condition

Your attitude has changed - by Christiaan Bastiaans 2015

Christiaan Bastiaans

Working process at the KCH’s artist in residency.

At the Behavioral Health Center, I produced notebooks with ideas and moodboards shaped as a film/live performance plan in progress.  Furthermore, I developed a radioplay- and a filmscript, that in its further processing, such as working with professional actors, will be integrated in an interdisciplinary presentation.
I used the KCH’s mental illness environment as the catalyst for the projects’s development. The environment is synonymous for a form of cross-pollination, a kind of synergy between all these elements, which resides in the soul of the inner structure of the artist-in-residence project and in the teamwork of the medical staff. The level of specialised support by KCH’s staff members have been centrifugal in the project’s progression. 
The KCH’s mandatory course provided me with a clear understanding of the hospital’s modus operandi and showed me the staff’s dedication and commitment.

In search for a vocabulary for the narrative, I sat in on evaluation meetings between staff members. I assimilated professional medical jargon and expressions unfamiliar to me and incorporated these in the narrative.
Concurrently, I filmed and photographed the building’s interior, choosing the extensive corridor netwerk in the basement and empty sections of the mental patients’s living quarters. By then, my project had a working title: “Code 66”. In November the Artists in Residence program at the Ace Hotel in New York was curated by Residency Unlimited (RU). I was one of the artists that participated and stayed overnight creating a site specific photo story in my hotelroom that became an offshoot, a kind of a trailer, for “Code 66”. I isolated medical related sentences from my radioplay narratives, printed these out and arranged them in the hotelroom taking into account the room’s interior. Subsequently I photographed each situation and edited it into a photo-novel.

The varying montages of aforementioned material (video, photos and audio) will produce distinctive non-linear narratives, unfolding in a fictitious Utopian Community that resides in an environment such as KCH. It will provide an immersive experience, a cumulative process foreshadowing the realisation of these themes in an interdisciplinary presentation.