July 2023, June 2024
The initial proposal for my secondment was to connect with Eindhoven’s positioning as a “smart” and “tech” hub. This positioning reflects Eindhoven’s move from an industrial centre built around electronics company Philips manufacturing to a post-industrial one based around Philips design and high-tech semiconductor manufacturing in (Philips owned) ASML. This economic positioning mirrors, in some ways, that of Dublin – which position itself also as a hub of tech companies and of Ireland as a major semiconductor manufacturing centre – however without the history of major manufacturing, large communities of migrant workers and from opposing positions in the relationship between coloniser and colonised. These similarities are also reflected in an increasingly stressed housing situation in which high-paid workers, under-regulated private rental accommodation and financialised housing development have begun to displace and inhibit rental for lower paid communities. Framed as a part of my Department of Embedded Knowledge project – the project intended to explore the “other” forms of innovation and “smartness” that exist within communities that are not captured in the narratives of The Smart City. In particular, the intention was to focus on practices of resilience, self-organisation and mutual support that allow communities under threat from capital to find ways to resist and survive the forces of global capital.
Having spent some time within the Van Abbe museum and with the curatorial team the project took an alternative direction based on the museum’s development of “constituent” practices – that sought to bring different communities into the museum as active participants in the museum programme. In particular, through work with the constituent archivist, the project began to focus on the way in which the museum’s archive would need to adapt to take on board the types of knowledge and knowledge communities that the constituent approach would involve.
In order to do this – the proposal became to work with one such constituent group to carry out a workshop to understand what knowledge would be archived and why. This work was planned for the second part of the secondment. Unfortunately, due to illness, the curator with whom I was working became unavailable for the second part of the secondment and so the workshops were not possible to achieve in the programmed time.