Two windows

Background

Amsterdam’s Red Light district has acquired a reputation for presenting an acceptable face of prostitution. It has even become a tourist destination. But there is another side to the story and it is altogether less acceptable.

The sex industry in the Netherlands is estimated to be worth $1 billion each year. Its 2000 brothels employ over 30,000 young women. 70% of them will have come from Eastern Europe. Many will have been trafficked.

Trafficking has been described as the ‘fastest growing criminal industry in the world’ with sales of human beings estimated to be worth $US 9 billion a year with some 27 million people trapped in slavery right now.

Idea

To correct the impression that the prostitutes of Amsterdam may all be there of their own free will, an installation was created in one of the canal houses. In the left window, a hologram of a pretty young girl shows her beckoning to customers out in the street. In the window on the right, passers-by get to see how she got there.

They see her parents being conned into believing their daughter has been offered a respectable job. On arrival in Amsterdam, they see her money and passport taken from her. They see her imprisonment. They see her forcibly given narcotics. They see her forced into the sex trade.

Eventually the girl tries to ring for help. At this moment, Bluetooth activates the mobile phones of the audience out on the street watching and they hear the girl’s voice speaking directly to them: ‘Help me, please help me.’

The images in the right-hand window now steer the viewers to www.stopthetraffik.org

Results

This unique initiative was wholeheartedly endorsed and supported by Amsterdam’s City council.

The Chief City Councillor has written about the action, “Informing the public in the heart of Amsterdam’s red light district could not be done in a more realistic and persuasive way.”

Antonie Fountain, spokesman for STOP THE TRAFFIK, was so enthused by the installation that he is currently in negotiation with several  European cities and government organizations to reproduce the installation in other notorious red light districts including London, Brussels and Berlin.

Interviews with those who witnessed the event in Amsterdam revealed that it had had a profound impact - not least because it exposed the brutality of the sex industry right before their very eyes. Coupled with the Blue Tooth phone call from the victim, the installation literally stopped people in their tracks, its immediacy and surprise adding a tangible level of engagement.

Our Thoughts

This was Carl le Blond’s swansong before moving from Amsterdam to be Executive CD of Ogilvy Moscow. A man of many talents, he has directed many commercials as well as art directing many more but this, I think, is his first installation.

It is a remarkable piece of live theatre but, for me, just as powerful as the story which unfolds in the window of the brothel are the faces of the watching passers-by as they begin to realise that they are part of the problem.

This idea has had two separate lives, one as an installation which would have had a direct effect on all those who saw it, but now as a video, showing us how we are all complicit in wanting to see the sex industry as somehow respectable.