What Happened in Rotterdam tells the story of a previously bleak and bombed harbor city that has benefitted from its ‘accidental’ erasure by transforming itself into what is now being called one of the coolest places on the planet.
As a sociologist and an artist, Charlie Koolhaas combines photography and writing to uncover the irrepressible creativity of the Netherlands most diverse city, where life casually reveals the undeniable vitality, successes and failures of Europe’s multi-cultural project at a moment in history when it’s under siege.
“In What Happened in Rotterdam photographer, essayist, and sociologist Charlie Koolhaas has entered the spirit of Rotterdam’s multicultural core to open a window into its soul. In her Sebaldian stream-of-consciousness essay, which bleeds from page to page with street-style photographs that reveal the city’s inhabitants in their everyday settings, we see and feel Rotterdam the way she does—as a voyeur in her element—under the newest form of citizenship.”
Caia Hagel, Art Papers, 2017 Magazine
