Before the Walls Disappear Art in a Place with No Tomorrow

Oct 3

8 min read

Some places feel alive because people are still using them. Others feel alive because they are running out of time.

That is the strange pull of the former Van Laere site in Zwijndrecht. It is not polished. It is not tidy. It is not trying to impress anyone in the usual way. The buildings are emptying out, the surfaces are rough, the corners are dusty, and the whole place carries that heavy feeling of something almost over.

Then the artists arrive.

With Planned for Demolition, this abandoned industrial site gets one last burst of energy before the walls come down. Around a hundred artists have taken over rooms, warehouses, windows, corridors and hidden corners. They are painting, building, hanging, spraying, cutting, arranging and leaving traces everywhere.

The result is hard to pin down. Part exhibition, part farewell. Part playground, part ruin. Part celebration, part goodbye.

And for a photographer, that tension is gold.

A site that refuses to leave quietly

The former Van Laere site has that unmistakable feeling of a place built for work. Big structures. Hard surfaces. Practical shapes. Nothing here was designed to be precious. These were buildings made to serve a purpose.

That is exactly what makes the transformation so good.

Art behaves differently in a place like this. In a white gallery, every work gets space, silence and control. Here, the walls already have history. Floors have stains. Rooms have echoes. Windows are dusty. Metal beams, peeling paint and old fixtures keep interrupting the artwork, but in the best possible way.

The art does not erase the building. It argues with it. It leans into it. Sometimes it almost disappears into it.

You can still feel what the site used to be. That matters. The VAN LAERE letters still dominate the outside, watching over the place like a stubborn reminder of its old life. Inside, the past is less direct but just as present. Marks on the walls. Scratches on doors. The shape of a room that once had a clear function but now feels open to anything.

Then a painted figure appears on a wall. Or a strange face hangs in the air. Or colour cuts across a window frame that used to be purely practical.

That mix is what makes the place so charged. You are not just looking at art. You are looking at art placed inside a building that knows it is finished.

And that changes everything.

There is no sense that the work is trying to become permanent. No one is pretending these walls will be protected forever. The coming demolition is part of the experience. It sits behind every photo, every brushstroke, every installation.

You walk through knowing this will not last. So you look harder.

The beauty is in the leftovers too

One thing I loved about photographing Planned for Demolition is that the “in-between” stuff often felt just as important as the finished work.

Empty paint buckets became part of the scene. Spray cans lay scattered on floors. Ladders, tape, cloth, bits of wood and loose materials turned into accidental still lifes. You could tell people had worked fast, freely and with very little interest in cleaning away every trace.

That mess gives the place its pulse.

In a normal exhibition, the tools disappear before the public arrives. Here, they stay close to the work. They remind you that all of this was made by hands, under time pressure, inside a site that is waiting to be torn down.

There is something honest about that.

A paint bucket beside a wall says more than it should. It says someone stood here. Someone chose this colour. Someone carried material through this cold, empty space and decided to add something instead of letting the building fade quietly.

The same goes for the spray cans. On their own, they are just tools. In this setting, they feel like evidence after a storm. A creative one, yes, but still a storm.

They point to the speed of the project. The energy. The fact that this was not made for eternity. It was made because the moment was there, and the walls were still standing.

That is why the leftovers matter in the photos. They keep the work from becoming too neat. They pull it back into the real world.

And honestly, they make the whole thing feel more human.

A perfect wall can be beautiful, sure. But a wall with paint drips, nearby cans, dusty footprints and tools left behind tells you what happened there. It lets you sense the labour. It keeps the movement alive.

For me, those details were not background. They were part of the artwork.

Light turns the buildings into a camera

Industrial buildings can be dark in a very specific way. Not cosy dark. Not dramatic in a staged sense. More like practical darkness. The kind that comes from deep rooms, blocked windows, high roofs and corners that were never meant to look pretty.

At the Van Laere site, that darkness becomes one of the strongest parts of the experience.

In some warehouses, thin strips of light cut across the space. They arrive through gaps, broken panels or high openings. They land on walls, floors and artworks in sharp lines. A room that might have felt flat suddenly becomes theatrical.

That is not because anyone set up a spotlight. It is because the building itself is leaking light.

As a photographer, you start chasing those leaks. A bright edge on a wall. A stripe across a doorway. A small glow on the side of a painted face. A reflection that only appears if you stand in exactly the right spot.

It makes you move slowly.

You cannot just walk in, take the obvious shot and leave. The place asks you to adjust. To wait. To look from the side. To notice how a window changes a room, or how a dark wall can make a bright colour feel even stronger.

The best moments often come from that meeting between art and accident.

A painting might be powerful on its own, but then a blade of light crosses it and suddenly the building joins in. A dark warehouse might feel empty, until a coloured shape pulls your eye towards the far end. A forgotten corner might not seem worth photographing, until the light catches a texture that everyone else walks past.

That is one of the quiet joys of shooting in a temporary place. Nothing feels fully controlled. The work, the building, the weather, the dust and the time of day all take part.

And because the site will disappear, those small light moments feel even more fragile.

You know you may never get the same frame again.

Windows become frames, mirrors and traps

The windows were some of the most interesting parts of the site for me.

Not because they were clean or beautiful in the classic sense. They were often dirty, marked, broken up by frames or half-covered by interventions. But that is what made them so good.

Artists had turned some windows into abstract compositions. Colour sat against glass. Shapes interrupted the view. Reflections layered the outside over the inside. Suddenly, the window was no longer only a way to look through. It became something to look at.

That shift is small, but once you notice it, the whole place changes.

You start seeing frames everywhere.

A doorway frames a painted wall. A window frames another building. A reflection frames a person passing by. A cracked surface frames the sky. The site becomes full of pictures inside pictures.

One of the strongest moments came from a solitary figure becoming part of the artwork. Not posing, not performing, just being there. In a place like this, a person can change the whole scale of a scene. Suddenly you feel the size of the wall, the height of the room, the emptiness around them.

The human figure also adds a different kind of time.

The building has industrial time. Years of use, abandonment, demolition plans. The artwork has temporary time. Days or weeks of creation, then disappearance. A person walking through has instant time. One second they are there, the next they are gone.

Put those together in one frame and the photo becomes less about a single object. It becomes about layers of presence.

That sounds grand, but on the ground it feels simple. You raise the camera because something lines up. A figure, a reflection, a painted shape, a dark frame. You press the shutter because waiting would ruin it.

Then the moment is gone.

That is photography at its most addictive.

The suspended face says what nobody says out loud

Some artworks at the site shout. Others whisper. Then there are works that seem to watch.

The monumental suspended face is one of those.

Placed inside a building already marked for disappearance, it carries a strange weight. A face hanging in space will always do something to a room. It creates a presence. It makes the empty volume feel occupied. Even if there is no movement, you feel watched.

That sounds slightly eerie, and it is. But it is also tender.

Because the face does not save the building. It cannot stop the demolition. It cannot freeze the site in place. It simply hovers there, for a while, giving the structure one last guardian or witness.

That is the part that stuck with me.

So much of Planned for Demolition works because it does not deny the ending. It does not try to cover the sadness with colour. It accepts that the site is temporary and then asks what can still happen inside that limit.

The answer, apparently, is a lot.

People can gather. Artists can take risks. Viewers can wander. Photographers can preserve fragments. Walls can carry one more story before they fall.

The suspended face feels like a symbol of that. It watches over a place that is already slipping away. It gives the building a final expression before the rubble comes.

There is a strange comfort in that.

Not everything needs to be saved to matter. Some things matter because they happened at the right time, in the right place, with the right amount of urgency.

Photography becomes a way of holding on

Taking photos at a place like this feels different from photographing a finished museum show or a permanent public artwork.

There is more pressure, but not in a stressful way. More like awareness. You know the work has a short life. You know the building has a short life. You know the details you are framing may soon exist only as memory, image or story.

That changes the role of the camera.

The camera is not just recording what is there. It is helping something survive in another form.

Of course, a photograph is not the same as the place itself. It cannot give you the smell of dust, the cold air inside a warehouse, the echo of footsteps, or the odd thrill of turning a corner and finding a huge painted wall where you expected nothing.

But it can hold a fragment.

It can keep the way light touched a floor. It can keep the chaos of paint buckets after a long day. It can keep the contrast between old industrial surfaces and new colour. It can keep the feeling of a building having one final conversation with the people inside it.

That is why impermanent art often photographs so strongly. The image carries the loss inside it.

When you look at the photo later, you are not only seeing what was there. You are also aware that it may no longer exist. That gives the image a quiet ache.

And maybe that is the point.

Planned for Demolition is powerful because it does not pretend art always needs a long future. Sometimes the short life of a work makes it sharper. More generous. Less careful. More alive.

The artists knew these walls would not last. They created anyway.

There is something beautiful in that choice.

We spend so much time trying to keep things, protect them, store them, archive them and make them permanent. This project goes the other way. It says: here is a place with no tomorrow, so let’s fill it while we can.

That does not make the disappearance less real. The buildings will still go. The paintings and installations will go with them. The rooms will stop being rooms. The windows will no longer catch reflections. The walls will no longer carry colour.

But for a while, before the machines arrive, the site becomes unforgettable.

And the photographs become proof that it happened.

Not proof in a cold, documentary sense. More like a shared memory. A way of saying: look, this was here. People made this. It mattered, even if it did not stay.

That is the contradiction I keep coming back to. Planned for Demolition creates something extraordinary while admitting, from the start, that it has to be let go.

Maybe that is why it feels so honest.

Some walls are built to last. Some walls become meaningful just before they disappear.