During Dutch Design Week 2022 three early evening pop-up salons connect a research on human footprints by designer Ineke Hans and DEA alumni Ned Kaar, with curator Annemartine van Kesteren’s online expo 'The Decay Economy' for Museum Boijmans van Beuningen.
22 October 2022, Make Eindhoven
Since the industrial revolution of the late 19th century, modern society has emerged, bringing with it the social, ecological, and economic issues of sustainability that our planet is experiencing today.
The role and place of craft in societies around the world has changed since the invention of mass production, while ultimately the form and the objects of crafts persist.
This combination of durability and change within fields widely associated with identity, culture, and heritage, positions craft as a tool for correcting the issues that have arisen in the past 100 years, reminiscent of alternative ways of living and producing.
Reasonably it might be thought that we could reinstate the importance and role of craft within the Netherlands to its previous standing 100 years ago, however in this time the contemporary Dutch consumer has emerged. The people in a sense have changed, and a new history is writ large across this past. To return to the deep past is as impossible as an erasure of recent history.
The durability of craft and its practices has come into direct contact with the aspects and ideas within society that have changed most in modernisation such as markets, certification, labour rights, technology, ecology. By way of these ideas, the values of modernity are entrenched within democratised consumerism and material culture.
Initiatives to reinvent the role of craft must meet the reality of crafts role and place today if they are to evolve and maintain the characteristics that make it such a component of identity, culture, and creativity.
Designers can play a role in dreaming big for craft, beyond the borders of the object and into the immaterial realms of systems and structures.
A full report might come online later