During Covid, while cycling the streets of Maastricht and the surrounding region, Andreassen’s work began to take a quieter, more observational turn. His new series of photographs, titled Obstructions (2022), indexes the city’s rigid, often overdetermined urban planning.
One photo captures an assemblage of outdoor seating integrated into a small park. Closer inspection, however, reveals benches cutting into the trunks of trees. Unable to anticipate or accommodate a changing landscape, the park’s architecture has fated the trees to grow into their own deaths.
Another photo reveals a patch of grass encircled by concrete boulders. A measure intended to protect a small plot of land has effectively trampled it.
In this series Andreassen identifies public interventions intended for one purpose that end up precipitating very different, often contradictory, outcomes. If, in his previous works, transformations within or opposition to semi-public and privatized spaces were initiated by human gestures, these photographs capture objects that themselves appear to embody a dual potentiality.
