WHY ARE WE ESCAPING FROM CITIES? A fashion editorial by Isabelle Wenzel,

To a certain degree, I believe that the downsides of cities surpass the benefits. Housing prices, limited space, pollution, anonymity and the pressure of success. I think you can get a better feel for who you are and what you believe in a less crowded space. Although you can lose yourself wonderfully in cities. It appears to me that people do not appreciate getting lost as much nowadays. They like to have a map and a good plan of where to go. Or they just can’t afford the city anymore. I belong to the second category. I ended up in a small town and I get lost in the way I move my body and how I have built my life.

Inside Issue 11 Isabelle Wenzel C41magazine Photography 4 — JIL SANDER dress TYT tights SUNNEI shoes

I left Amsterdam in 2012. I was pregnant with my first child. My life and work had been improvised until then. Like all other metropolises, Amsterdam is crammed with people so space is extremely limited and housing prices are high. We always lived somewhere temporary or sublet something. We were constantly uncertain about when and where we would move next. For me and all my artist friends, that meant we had to stay flexible and innovative in order to make our living and find our space. When I became a parent, I felt the impulse for more stability in my life. My partner and I decided to move somewhere where we knew we could afford to live without giving up our freedom as artists. Neither of us were willing to take on steady employment, which implied a very uncertain income on one hand but lots of freedom on the other. It had to be a very cheap place. Still, we wanted to move somewhere close enough that we wouldn’t completely lose our connection to Amsterdam. We looked everywhere and nowhere and still didn’t really know where to go. We ended up back in my hometown Wuppertal in Germany, which is two and a half hours from Amsterdam by train. This move seemed quite easy, too easy actually. It felt like moving backwards and I was very unhappy about it at first. I missed the fast and crowded beat of Amsterdam, the sheer number of wild free spirits that made belonging to the odd-ones-out the norm. But the benefits outweighed the rest. Wuppertal is not big but it still provides all the pros of bigger cities, such as cafés, clubs, theatre and a great dance scene.

We can afford a beautiful apartment, a garden and a studio of a size that would never ever have been possible in Amsterdam, plus we’ve got the grandparents around. However, the idea of stability was an illusion, and I eventually came to realise that this is a positive thing. The only thing that really remains constant is my creative drive, my will to go on and my love for my family. Since leaving Amsterdam, I have recognised that I am more focused. There is not as much going on, such as openings and parties that would otherwise distract me all the time. And my inspiration now mainly develops from within myself since external impact is limited. It feels as though I lived in self-enforced isolation even before Covid19. A solitude with myself which becomes meditation. Whenever there is nothing to do, I just create work and when there is something to do, I still create work. It is like I’m living on this private island in my own cosmos of production. There is a place where I create work, which is where I live, and there is the space where I show my work, which is the world.