Duration: 08.2004 - 06.2005
Location: Nieuw Crooswijk, Rotterdam
Participants: 168
Visitors: 1,200
Number of Events: 13
Additional Presentations: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (06.2005-08.2005)

Within the next ten years the Nieuw Crooswijk area in Rotterdam will undergo a massive regeneration. More than ninety percent of the social housing dwellings will be torn down and replaced by middle-class residences. Expectations are that ninety percent of the current residents, mainly working-class people of various ethnic backgrounds, will not be able to return to their neighbourhood. Many of these people have lived in Nieuw Crooswijk for several generations. Their identity is strongly linked to the area's history. With Het Dwaallicht (The Will o' the Wisp) (2004), Van Heeswijk and a team of experts researched the links, connections and relationships within the area in cooperation with its residents.

For a year Het Dwaallicht wandered through the area seeking out the social web and energies that determine its character and identity and link its different urban dynamics. Based on residents' stories and past and current events, mystery writer Dick van den Heuvel wrote a monthly chapter chronicling this mysterious search. These stories were then re-enacted in various locations in the area at monthly events staged in cooperation with residents. For instance, musician Paul de Jong composed a piece based on the sound of Crooswijk, which he performed at various venues, from the local butcher's, to the Asian shop to the Open House, a drop-in and food distribution centre for deprived elderly people. Children demonstrated their vision of the street they lived and played in. There was a guided audio tour of the graveyard, noting memorials to historic figures as well as to beloved neighbourhood residents. Youngsters staged a music and theatre performance around their 'bad reputation', and former strangers shared a friendly meal. Even the current residents' supposedly antisocial nature - a preconception on the part of the regeneration planners - was the subject of an event.

These new stories were then distributed through a door-to-door newspaper. Through the accumulation of these stories a 'new history' of Nieuw Crooswijk was written and its energy mapped out. Het Dwaallicht tried to capture the cultural history of Nieuw Crooswijk and its residents for the future to create a narrative monument to the community. At the end of the project's first year Het Dwaallicht wandered for two months in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, telling its story about a lost neighbourhood. This story will be published in a historical novel: Het Dwaallicht van Crooswijk ('The Will o' the Wisp of Crooswijk').