a roadmovie to my home by Henk Hofstede Swans and waterbikes slide over the big pond of Lyon's Tete d'Or park. Two hours ago, the airplane landed and now in the late afternoon I'm walking to the museum of contemporary arts. My shoes are grinding in the purple shade of the trees. The light is beautifull. This day has been coloured by all French impressionists. With the scent of the rosegarden im my nose I walk straight to Richard. The music-journalist Richard Robert is one of the guest-conservatories of Lyon's Biennale. Thierry Prat and Thierry Raspail, the two 'directeurs artistiques', have asked him to bring together a number of international musicians for an exhibition. Richard asked Robert Wyatt (GB), Arto Lindsay (USA), Frederic le Junter (F). And he asked me. We first met years ago in Paris, where he interviewed me for the French pop-magazine Les Inrockuptibles. An alternative magazine, run by young turks that rushed outside after an interview to make a artist-picture in the street. It looked beautifull. Long stories with page-sized black and white photographs. The stories Richard wrote gave 'Les Nits' a cult-status in France that lasts until today. He saw our concerts in Paris and knew our videoclips and the video-projections during the concerts. We often discussed the possibilities of image and sound and he encouraged me to go beyond the videoclip, and experiment more. When he phoned me last december, asking me to make something for the Biennale, we soon agreed that it would be a video-installation with music written especially for the occasion. My first plan was to make a long roadmovie of all the footage of more than twenty years of touring with the Nits. I have taken along videocameras to every corner in Europe and beyond, but rarely look at the results. Lately I found out that the images on the first VHS-tapes are, like those in my mind, starting to fade. My tapes are poorly archivated: sometimes they are labelled with a year or a country, or worse, just 'snow' or 'water Jisp'. My homerecordings seamlessly take over from the bandlife on the road, a noisy Parisian La Cigalle dressing room recording suddenly changes into a babbling babyface, and the blowing out of four candles with a lot of excited children's voices suddenly jumps to almost soundless images of a tenth's story view from a Helsinki hotel room. In the beginning of this year, during a German tour, after a sleeplees night in a Ikea-boysroom-hotel in Freiburg, at the rumbling along of the cargotrains in the morning, I decided to forget the roadmovie. The video installation will be about my home in Amsterdam with my beloved ones. We have been living there from 1988 and I have a video-recording of the first day I walked the stairs. Green chestnut leaves behind the kitchen window, a bare, empty house, still without chidren. From Freiburg I sent Richard a letter with schetches. Four projections next to each other on one wall. A quadriptych unfolded. Sometimes I use four cameras simultaneously for one scene. Sometimes I combine the past and the present. Our three daughters have been born in this house, and I have tapes full of babies, balletperformances and Christmas trees. I search for the moment during eveningmeal where I'm slowly walking away with the camera from the table to the window and I'm filming the freshly fallen snow. The black trails of the bicycles, the roof of a parked car and the tram riding along the park with its long squeak of littered nails. I search for the sleeping child in the low winter light. I search the plastic bag in the tree opposite the window that has been fluttering and waving for months and that has disappeared in summer in the thick blanket of leaves. I catch the child that is dancing with a green shawl in slow motion. I search for the yellow crescent of the moon high in the kitchen window and place it opposite the close up of a baby's face. Together with Nits-engineer Paul Telman I put all images in the computer and what follows is a weeks-long video-edit. By that time, the plan is clear: eleven quadriptyches of two minutes with songs (piano and voice), electronical sounds en environmental sounds. Title : The Portable House. With the results on four DVD's I walk through the white labyrinth of the museum. Some halls are still empty, others are full of scaffoldings, ladders, people with hammers and tape measures. An exhibition under construction. "This is your room", Richard says. It's an enormous white space with four projectors on the ceiling. On the wall opposing me four blue rectangles with No Signal No Signal No Signal No Signal. I put the discs in the DVD players, take the remote control and press PLAY. Connivence, Biennale de Lyon Art Contemporain,2001