Monumental calligraphy in Amare: Which songs do you recognise?
October 2025, interview
Anyone who’s walked around Amare in the past weeks will not have failed to notice them: huge painted musical notes on the walls. The artists of FreelingWaters are happy to tell you all about the work, from choosing the songs to designing a calligraphic letter font to applying their personally concocted type of paint inside the building.
FreelingWaters is a collaboration of the artists Gijs Frieling and Job Wouters. The duo applies their art to design, fashion and educational environments. So far they have painted walls, rooms and facades, but also cabinets, wooden books and textiles.
They find inspiration in a wide and diverse array of cultural and historical sources. “From paintings in ancient Pompei to graffiti from the 1970s. From American lettering to early medieval paintings. From Joseph Beuys to Tilda Swinton. From Hokusai to Jonathan Meese. And from Van Gogh to Hilma af Klint”. For their project in Amare, the duo turned to music. They explain how vocal music throughout the centuries is full of sung notes that do not form words but serve as a vehicle of melodic expression, rhythmic punctuation and emotional outbursts. With the series of art works titled AH! OH! AH! OH!, FreelingWaters has created a visual tribute to this phenomenon.
Job and Gijs worked with Amare to compile a selection of very precise articulations of these types of sounds in songs. “We thought it would be fun to use excerpts from the widest possible range of music styles and eras,” the artists explain. The final selection includes artists from David Bowie (Beauty and the Beast, 1977) to the Spice Girls (Wannabe, 1996), with Doechii (DENIAL IS A RIVER, 2025) as the most recent addition. They have created a Spotify list of all these songs, which you can listen to via the link provided below.
The artists also developed a calligraphic letter font specifically for this project. The shapes of the letters reflect the architecture of the Amare building. “The letters consist of carefully applied brush strokes, creating a unique type of monumental calligraphy.”
To transfer the letters onto the walls, FreelingWaters also used a special type of paint that they developed using some twenty pigments. Depending on the context, various binding agents are added. Because the pigments are barely mixed, they retain their power and intensity. It’s just like cooking, the artists say: “With just a handful of very good ingredients, there’s not much you need to do to create delicious dishes!” The paint is used to paint the different parts of the letters in a single smooth brush stroke. This leaves room for imperfection, and here and there you can still see pencil markings on the wall.
The painted texts can be found throughout the building until the end of 2026. Which of the songs on our walls can you identify?
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