At Amsterdam Schiphol Airport, a new permanent installation signed by Dutch designer Maarten Baas goes into operation, continuing and expanding a research begun years ago on the relationship between art, theater, and design. After the 2016 intervention in Lounge 2, Baas has now created the Schiphol People’s Clock for Lounge 1: a 250 × 250 × 250 cm cube composed of four synchronised screens. Instead of a traditional analogue clock face, the work features a continuous twelve-hour video in which the hour and minute hands are formed by coordinated and synchronised movements of groups of people, while the seconds are represented by a single performer running along the entire perimeter.
The People’s Clock thus retains its function as a timekeeping device while simultaneously exposing its operation as a process. The measurement of time becomes the result of a collective choreography, recorded in a single overhead take inside one of the airport’s hangars. Around one thousand volunteers took part in its creation, most of them Schiphol employees, who also participated in parallel activities and shared moments throughout the day.
The result is a perfectly functional “clock” grounded in human action, as the construction of time itself is both collective and human. There are no hidden mechanisms—only a continuous, visible, and repeating choreography.
Both clocks at the airport are part of Baas’s Real Time series, which began in 2009. The new installation openly engages with the 2016 work, in which a figure painted the clock hands in real time, sharing the same idea of timekeeping that is as irreverent as it is functional, and far from conventional.
Finally, the commission confirms Schiphol's focus on integrated artistic interventions in transit spaces, in line with a Dutch tradition that tends to overlap design, communication, and use. In this context, Baas's work reflects this mindset by making visible, without emphasis, the substratum of relationships and labor on which the functioning of the airport is based, deciding to pay homage to the thousands of workers on which the airport depends.
Opening image: People's Clock (2026) by Maarten Baas, photo Thijs Wolzak