Occupy Baltan

  • Exhibition Social Design Residency 

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    Social Design Residency of Occupy Baltan

    Final exhibition of the occupants


    Four months ago we initiated the Social Design Residency of Occupy Baltan. We invited three designers to work on their projects within the local communities of Eindhoven. The residents Martina Eddone, Camila Vieira, and Viviana M. Calderón de la Barca have a different background and diverse approach in involving the community.

    As a closure of their residency at Baltan, we invite you on Friday 10 December to the opening of the exhibition. We will raise a glass and have a chat with the residents, while having the opportunity to get an insight into their projects. The exhibition will be open from the 10th of December until the 11th of February, at Natlab.

    Due to Covid the opening will be celebrated in a small setting, and we ask you to reserve a timeslot via Eventbrite

    The following projects will be shown:

    Full Voids investigates how representations of the urban landscape influence the way we co-habit it. The project now takes the shape of a workshop, aimed to create a collective visual portrait of a neighbourhood.

    Exercising awareness, attention and critical reflection towards everything that is part of our normality and everyday life, is the first step to realise how artificially constructed – and therefore possibly subjected to change – is most of the social dynamics, habits, traditions that we normally consider as ‘natural’ and immutable. This awareness should make us feel empowered to enact changes in the way we live together, starting even from a very small scale like our own household.
    The general aim of this research is to use visual and information design to reflect on what it means to be sustainable in different aspects of life, first on a local level, then progressively (and possibly) towards a global perspective. In particular, Full Voids aims to strengthen in us the feeling of being part of a collective interdependent whole (the ecosystem), next to being a single individual entity, starting from looking at our everyday space – your household, your school, your neighbourhood.

    Martina Eddone is an Italian visual designer, currently based in the Netherlands, who holds a master’s degree in Information Design (Design Academy Eindhoven). Although with a professional background mostly related to graphic and web design, she has always been interested in physical spaces and participatory practices related to design and storytelling.
    Eddone interprets information design as a tool to facilitate the dissemination of and access to knowledge, with the final aim to make the audience question the way they perceive the world around them and themselves in relation to it. The latest steps of her research led to a reflection on ecosystem representation, and specifically, on how to turn the making of an ecosystem representation into a participatory process that triggers unconventional interactions among people and between people and places.

    The Immigrant’s Imagery Museum project is the result of the course Curatorship in an expanded field developed by Camila during the social design residency. It entails discussing Heritage, Self Image, Exotification, and Visual Arts De-Colonization in the broad area of Art History and Museum Collections. The participants learned the basics of conceiving, writing, and making an art exhibition by learning from theoretical references, virtual visits to online Art exhibitions, and group discussions starting from their particular point of view about the experience of being an immigrant.
    By participating as co-curators, the group chose artworks that better reunite the qualities they believe are essential to transmitting their Culture and heritage’s uniqueness. The final product is a curatorship in a Virtual 360° museum consisting of an exhibition curated by the resident, Brazil, and the course attendant's Maria Elena Albuerne Ponce, Mexico, Chen Yu Wang, Taiwan, and Anna Buyvid, USSR.

    Camila Vieira, aka Coletora.ca, is an abstract artist and art educator who currently develops research about using new technologies such as Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality in the expanded field of curatorship and art education. Graduated at Art: History, Criticism, and Curatorship from the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo/ Brazil, she has several articles published at Revista Desvio.

    Occupy Cultural Threads aims to document (written as well as audio-visually) the intergenerational consumer behaviour and sustainable approaches to textile design.
    The aim of this is to empower and share information with the community, as one response to sustainable consumerism in the textile and fashion industry in Eindhoven. Eventually, this project will be included to Life Is a Cultural Thread (2022) documentary, planned to premiere in 2022.
    While the target outcome is to share over intergenerational consumer behaviour and sustainable design aspects in this project, other socio cultural topics (such as intergenerational collaboration, post-retail consumerism, eventual reuse of textiles and clothing, creating awareness of over consumerism, or slow fashion) are part of the theoretical research.

    Viviana M. Calderón de la Barca is a Documentary and fiction screenwriter. It’s been over 15 years since Viviana first arrived in the Netherlands directly from Toronto, Canada where she was working in translation, tourism and as a volunteer for Sprockets Toronto International Film Festival for Children — and of course, where she enlarged her pedagogical skills since her years as junior kindergarten teacher in her native Mexico. Most recently, Viviana’s short documentary Life Is A Journey (2019), on migrant women empowerment, premiered at DOCfeed film festival in Eindhoven. She has been fortunate to work as a researcher for film directors and as a language and culture lecturer in Amsterdam University, where the interest in developing audiovisual materials for education grew. Therefore right from the beginning in her role as a lecturer, she went all the way to pursue a master degree in screenwriting in Barcelona’s Autonomous University in Spain.

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