Ortelius Drew is a collaborative, mobile, and peformative drawing project led by artists Doreen Wittenbols (Amsterdam) and Ilga Leimanis (London). Taking the city as their principle subject matter, they focus on public settings of leisure (gardens and parks), sites of temporary architecture as well as public museum collections. As present-day flâneurs, they move through the city establishing temporary, yet deeply empathetic and intimate relationships with all that they see all the while conscious of both contemporary and historic gendering of public spaces.
Ortelius Drew situates itself within the realm of what Nicolas Bourriaud defines as Relational Art "an art taking as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space" (2002, p 14). The artists of Ortelius Drew work both individually and together in public. They lead drawing groups in their respective cities; and in the process, they attract observers from the public - who in turn take part in the broader, participatory aspect of this work. Notably research-based, Ortelius Drew's goal is to gain a greater insight into public exchanges in the city.