NICC Amsterdam Part 1 Project 2007 Micah Jones Ulster University | UK The building is encountered like a fragment of landscape or outcrop. Vertical in a horizontal city, it is stratified with events and spaces showcasing Northern Ireland. Enter the loop and travel down the slipway to the canal before turning into the darkness to touch the electronic peace wall of the Northern Ireland exhibition. Rise up through the supercore to the hovering galleries punctured with glass voids which bring light into the main space. Climb to the transplanted fragments of Irish wilderness on the roof, and look through the parasite wall of flexible artist accomodation and studios that frame through their slots, captured moments of the amsterdam city roofscape. Micah’s project is about re-discovering your own culture and history amidst another country. Like the exiled writer in Tarkovsky’s Nostalgia -who imagines he sees the Russian landscape in the ruins of an Italian church- this Cultural Centre for Northern Ireland (NICC) transposes the duality of past pains with vibrant contemporary culture in the city of Amsterdam.Beginning with a film he made in Belfast, the cinematic loop is Micah’s the starting point for a programme that wraps into a vertical landscape. A performance space, a honeycomb wall of artists spaces and a fragment of an electronic ‘peace wall’ are some of the ‘strata’.The most generous public space in the building recalls the height of the highest wall ever built in NI, that in the past kept people apart.