De Dingen: the exhibition

Monday 16 - Sunday 26 April 2018
Open: Wed - Sun, 12-17 hrs and during the events
Location: Stroom Den Haag, Hogewal 1-9, The Hague
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The 11-day festival De Dingen also features an exhibition with work by:

The Parliament of Things
The Embassy of the North Sea
The Parliament of Things launches The Embassy of the North Sea at Stroom, an extensive setting where giving things a voice is practiced. The goal of the Embassy is threefold: to investigate the relationship between humans and the sea; to make a political plea on behalf of the North Sea ecosystem; and to give the Embassy of the North Sea a physical presence in the centre of The Hague. On 29 June 2018, the Plea is presented in The Hague and handed over to the House of Representatives (De Tweede Kamer).

Simon Wald-Lasowski
Dusting off / Shiny Nails
Simon Wald-Lasowski is fascinated by the obsessive accumulation and acquisition of goods encouraged by consumer society. By embracing seemingly worthless curiosities and glorifying their triviality, he tries to bring out the absurd in the everyday.
Dusting off restages an inaccessible object, Tacita Dean's 2011 Manhattan Mouse Museum. Dean's 16mm film, only exhibited in strict viewing conditions and unavailable online, takes a glimpse into the world of artist Claes Oldenburg as he tends to an assembly of small rarities, objects and artworks.
Basing his 're-imagined' version on a few still images of Manhattan Mouse Museum, Simon aims to channel the tender and intimate attention Claes Oldenburg exhibited towards his objects by interacting with his own personal collection of curiosities. This piece seeks to pinpoint the subject of the work in its various iterations: Oldenburg's various things have been replaced by the inaccessible object of Dean's film, and in Dusting off, by a high-grade 4K digital file.

Marjanne Helvert & Pauline Agustoni
The Library of Material Rights
Installation, domestic habitat and object library Material Rights for Materials Left proposes to extend the legal rights usually granted to humans to the materials they use to build their environment. It is inspired by the idea of the ‘resource tower', a self-built unit that concentrates all domestic resources into a central lounge, from Victor Papanek's 1973 book Nomadic Furtniture. When we consider the category of ‘rights' we must necessarily to expand it to befit all things, because these things in turn extend their rights to us: their sustainability promotes the proliferation of human culture, habits, and species. Material Right for Materials Left envisions the responsibility over the rights we already exercise over things nonhuman - by extracting, transforming, creating, using and discarding them - through its consideration of speculative biology, the material history of sustainable design, and self-sustainability. It invites the audience to rearrange their categorisation of objecthood.

The Rodina
Oh Son, Dear Son

The Rodina's installation articulates the effects of human-machine entanglements on contemporary labour practices.
Graphic design is one of the prime fields where human and machine become more and more entangled. As motherboards become smaller, computers quieter and more powerful, digital labour becomes seemingly less material, less visible and audible, and so do the circumstances of labour itself. The living-time of bodies disappears into the working-time of computers.
Oh Son, Dear Son is a monument to the freelance designer. It is an ‘audio situation' which takes the Czech folk song Oh Son, Dear Son (Ach Synku, Synku) as a starting point to consider the human-machine entanglements of digital design. It seeks to make this convolution audible: 2 hands, 2 eyes, one mouth, a brain floating inside skull, bones in fingers, keyboard strokes, vibration of cooling fan resonating in working desk, silicon chips on motherboard, squeaking of office chairs, mouse clicks, the gurgle of a coffee machine pump. 300 hours of labour have been compressed into a 6-minute soundscape.

MORE ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS

The Parliament of Things
The Embassy of the North Sea

The Embassy of the North Sea is an initiative by The Parliament of Things and is built by Stroom Den Haag, Stichting De Noordzee, Building Conversation, The Pink Pony Express and Waag Society with support from Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industrie, Gemeente Den Haag, Mondriaan Fonds en Bank Giro Loterij Fonds and collaborations with Studio Alloy, Jasper van den Berg, Partizan Publik, Andrea Simmelink and Jasmine De Bruycker. Objects curated by Tjallien Walma van der Molen.

Simon Wald-Lasowski
As he peered through the window of a shop full of strange odds and ends, Simon Wald-Lasowski's heart skipped a beat.

Marjanne van Helvert
Marjanne van Helvert is a designer, writer, and educator. She received an MA in Cultural Studies from the Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen (2007) and a BDes in Textile Design from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie Amsterdam (2013). She explores the dynamics between theory and practice of design, within the realms of design ethics and aesthetics, DIY practices, gender politics, utopia and dystopia. Other projects include the manifesto Dirty Design (2013), the Dirty Clothes collection (ongoing), and the book The Responsible Object: A History of Design Ideology for the Future (2016, Valiz Publishers).

Pauline Agustoni
Pauline Agustoni is a practitioner from La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, whose field of action involves conceptual, material, object, textile and spatial design. Her approach stimulates her to freely explore the theoretical and practical sides of design, merging hands-on work with research and theory. Interested in the influence of products and materials on our daily lives, she aims to develop alternatives in how we produce and consume goods.

The Rodina
The Rodina (Tereza and Vit Ruller) are a critical design studio with an experimental practice drenched in strategies of performance art, play, and subversion. Both in commissioned work and an autonomous practice, they activate and re-imagine a dazzling range of layered meanings across, below, and beyond the surface of design. Interested in connections between culture, technology, and aesthetics, they design events, objects, and tools. Their cross-media approach allows examining communication as thousands of small interactions which leads to actions. Tereza is an educator at Man & Communication at Design Academy Eindhoven and Vit teaches Creative Coding at Graphic Design department at Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague.