participate

  • Introducing our Occupy Baltan residents 

  • Be Sociable, Share:

    < Back to library

    Posted: 16 September 2021


    Occupy Baltan Social Design Residency

    Social design projects with Eindhoven’s local communities


    The “Occupy Baltan Social Design Residency” hosts three residents that currently occupy the Lab. Together they are working in the field of social design involving local communities. They themselves are from different fields, like information design, documentary film-making and art education. Let us introduce to you our occupants and their projects.

    Viviana M. Calderón de la Barca
    Documentary and fiction screenwriter Viviana M. Calderón de la Barca, is all set for her social design residency at Baltan Laboratories on sustainable consumerism in the fashion retail in Eindhoven, focused on the reuse of textiles and fabrics. It’s hard to believe that 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 begining 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. Just like everyone around the world, Viviana had to put a lot of plans on hold when the pandemic hit in 2020. Yet, jobless and being at home for an unusually prolonged period of time had allowed her to develop her new documentary that talks about intergenerational collaboration, women in art, textile design, and entrepreneurship, and also be part of this great experience at Baltan Laboratories.

    Project: Cultural Thread
    Her residency project “Cultural Thread” is a sensible community, social and intergenerational project and part of her documentary film in the making on women artists, designers, and entrepreneurs involved in the textile craft in Eindhoven, as in other parts of the Netherlands and the world. As part of Occupy Baltan, further research will be carried out, most specifically on sustainable approaches in to fashion consumerism and the impact of reusing and recycling fabrics and clothing.

    Camila Vieira
    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. As the creator of the @Fábrika project, which aims to reconstruct an abandoned factory in Perus, São Paulo, virtually, she intends to give form to a virtual, accessible, educational curatorship that reveals the local social struggles and pays tribute to the district’s history to rescue the local memory.

    Project: The Immigrant’s Imagery Museum
    Her project during this residency, the Immigrant’s Imagery Museum, consists of a virtual 360°exhibition that reunites the most iconic artworks of the origin country of immigrant groups who currently live in Eindhoven.
    The curatorship will showcase the main ones or most iconic artworks produced by artists born in the land where those immigrants came and display those images in a virtual gallery space that will allow them to visit those artworks through virtual reality using VR glasses. Everybody practices their cultures every day; however, access to that heritage can be hampered by geographic distance or economic situation. The main objective of this project is to provide the experience of accessing one more time, or for the first time, those artworks that formulate meaningful discussions about heritage, culture, hope, politics, narratives and aesthetics intrinsic to those cultural backgrounds.

    Martina Eddone
    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.

    Project: Full Voids
    Martina Eddone’s residency project “Full Voids” project consists of a series of representations of a neighbourhood in Eindhoven, where the designer lives. They focus on a particular infrastructural element: the void, namely a space in-between, undefined and liminal. Generally overlooked, in this project the voids are regarded as starting points to imagine alternative ways of dwelling in a city that is home also to non-human agents. The aim is to investigate how representations of the urban landscape influence the way we co-habit it.

    During the residency, Martina Eddone will continue the production of her neighbourhood representations, seeking to open up the design process and involve more inhabitants of the area. How will the representations change with a higher degree of participation? She chose to focus on voids, on which aspects or agents of the urban ecosystem will other people decide to focus on? If we intend representation making as a practice rather than a result, what kind of effect could it have on a sense of community? Will it strengthen bonds and feeling of belonging?

    Meanwhile, on a more theoretical level, Eddone will progressively define and clarify some guidelines to critically analyse ecosystem representation, and to critically approach the creation of new ones. The hope is to gen
    erate a creative common that can be used by other people in other contexts, to undertake a narration of the ecosystem in which they live or they are interested.

    Get in touch:

    Are you triggered by the occupations of the three residents? Do you want to share a thought or even offer help? Feel free to reach out to​ us and get into conversation via leif@baltanlaboratories.org

    Explore our gallery!

    content

    test lexicon

    economia

    Economia is the festival of

    < Back to library