Humanity Hallows Issue 5 Out Now
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By Charlie Fyfe-Williams
Image: Thomas Lenden
Earlier this month, dutch artist Julian Hetzel shook the city when he brought the shady anthropomorphic figures of his Hello Hollow project to Manchester. Also known widely by his stage name Le Schnigg of the Electro-pop band Pentatones, Hetzel works as a performance and visual artist alongside his music, cropping up every now and again in cities around the globe with trademark ephemerality to test the limits of the public space. The project was created with the help of students from the Manchester School of Art and formed part of part of the 2017 SICK! Festival. Hetzel’s dormant, structures could be found sitting on benches in All Saints Park and on Brunswick Street near the University of Manchester.
Speaking about the project Hetzel says, “Black plastic foil is used to enter a disturbing dialogue on presence through absence and on the seductive power of the surface. What is visible is exactly what is in front of the very eyes of the spectator and in the same time it is everything else.”
Well-known for an observational and documentary approach to his art, during this public display, Hetzel recruited a team of volunteers and art students to monitor and record the physical, verbal and emotional reactions and response to something you don’t expect to see. Manchester Met’s Public Art Coordinator Eleanor Donaldson, who was working closely with Hetzel on the project, explained that the idea behind the demonstration was to test people’s tolerance, challenging the limits of where we feel our space is and upsetting the conventions of public spaces.
The intriguing figures spent the day in All Saints Park basking in the sun. One student said, “I was looking at that thing for nearly half an hour waiting for it to move before I realised it wasn’t some guy dressed up, then I felt a bit weird and couldn’t look any more.”
In the Netherlands, Hetzel carried out the Hello Hollow project in two different parks: one in a privileged area and another in a deprived area, and the levels of public space interference varied heavily between the two. Whereas in the privileged area Hetzel was able to successfully record the human response, in the deprived area the police were instantly called and rushed to the scene.
For more information about Hetzel’s work, visit the artist’s website.
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