Pamphlets for the State of Translocality
    Van Abbe Museum and city space of Eindhoven, 2008 The series of interventions and performances in the city space of Eindhoven examined and acted on the manifold layers of the (post-)industrial city: a local urban area in the Dutch region South Brabant being shot through by translocal passages, such as by Philips and other high-tech-companies, international university labs and design academies. Against the city’s effort to project a hyper-modern “Image City” onto the urban surface effecting that has an effect urban planning and housing on a deeper level, the group of artists acting in the name of the “State of Translocality” decided to tackle specific spots and situations by the use of low-tech media. Each artist started from the idea of a “pamphlet” to explore the potential and limits of small-scale interventions that was embedded in different performative contexts. Carla Cruz spread a “virus” in form of a pamphlet in the connecting passage of a shopping mall calling attention to surveillance and ownership of public space. Alexandra Ferreira and Bettina Wind as the initiators of the project sent a series of paper plane pamphlets with agitating messages for translocal workers and students over fences and into privately controlled areas. Rana Hamadeh created a visual interpretation of private and political translocal imaginations between the Netherlands and Lebanon in the format of small booklets, which she placed at several bus stops in the city. The series ended with a “pamphlet-like” discussion on questions of transnationality and art’s potential for interventions organized by Alicia Herrero. The traces of each intervention were displayed in a showcase in the entrance hall of the Van Abbe Museum. The project series was commissioned by the VanAbbe Museum in Eindhoven (NL) for the exhibition Be(com)ing Dutch in July 2008, following the Caucus Program 2007 at the museum, where the participating artists first met. |