Bertjan Pot, Liesbeth Abbenes and Maurice Scheltens are gathered in The Hague’s Museum Voorlinden after hours. How are they? “A bit tired,” admits Pot. It’s day 10 of a two-week residency that has seen the trio install a temporary kite studio in the museum. Each day, they help a new guest artist construct their dream kite to fly on the dunes outside, while motorised flying machines send colourful sails whizzing overhead and members of the public observe with curiosity.
This is the physical manifestation of Kite Club (@_kite_club_), a collective formed on Instagram for sharing handmade single-line kites. It is not normally a day job. Pot is an industrial designer, best known for his cocoon-style Random lights for Moooi and expressive PotMasks made from coils of coloured rope, while Scheltens and Abbenes are a still life photography duo, shooting for Hermès, Maison Margiela and Humanrace, as well as magazines like MacGuffin and The Gentlewoman. They caught each other’s attention in 2017 when Scheltens posted a rectangular Japanese Kaku Dako kite from a camping trip, “made out of a garbage bag, some tape I had in the car and some bamboo sticks that I found,” he says. “For two or three years we were just sharing kites with each other on Instagram,” says Pot. “Details of kites, or knots, pockets and connectors.”
