aboutthe project

The central motif, which came to dominate the development of the ‘collection’ of objects within the ‘Future Museum’ arose in response to the cultural and festive moment which the Netherlands was experiencing during the opening days of the artists residency out of which the ‘Museum’ would grow.

The success of the Dutch football team and it’s passage through the qualifying stages of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, saw much of Holland’s urban space swathed in the colour orange. The immediate festive significance of this colour, both as reflected in the team ‘strip’, and as the Dutch national colour personified in the name of the Royal household was striking.

The plethora of ephemeral orange objects generated out of this popularist moment immediately spoke to the tension between the ‘disposable’ and the ‘collectable’, between junk and treasure, and pointed to questions around who would be socially empowered to declare the difference.

An early set of activities within the ‘Future Museum’ therefore became the collecting, through purchase and donation of an array of orange ‘objects’. Within this context, the usurping by the outsider artist of the power to declare objects ‘museum worthy’ and to classify their significance as markers of an imagined Dutch present, could in itself be seen as a subversive reversal of the old ethnographic model.