Deconstructing self-image

These last words summarize the perception of the identity of Strijp-S. To deconstruct this self-image of the neighborhood, Pérez Gayo and Maher collected all kinds of data. These include things like policies on a national, provincial, municipal, and local level, from which they extracted the governmental guidelines on diversity, conservation, housing, and more. They looked at the management, organization, and infrastructure of the area, and collected all documents on urban planning. Along these lines, Pérez Gayo and Maher further researched all media outlets in the neighborhood and its residents, including both offline and online media. Here, the constructed identity seems to ‘performs’ itself: a Youtube video shared by the city of Eindhoven sketches the neighborhood as a place where industrial rawness meets young, artistic promises. It is a narrative that has been popularized since the deindustrialization of certain districts in New York in the 1950s and ’60s, causing a flourishing art scene with artists like Nam June Paik and Robert Rauschenberg moving their studio practices inside the big, high-ceiled lofts. In the last decades, this idea of industrial deserts turned into (temporary) creative hubs has popped up all over again.

Opening up the discussion

Even though for some people, these urban developments do not mean much, the governmental policies concerning them have real-life effects on the daily lives of people living and working. To understand who is living in, working at and visiting Strijp-S, and what the overall design decisions in the place mean for them, Pérez Gayo and Maher not only collected tons of data, but also organized public moments: “For us, it is important to identify patterns within the information we collected, and also points of tension. By creating different moments where people can come inside and access these sets of data, we can organize them in such a way as to open up a critical dialogue. Out of these dialogues, we can rearrange the data again, and present it in other formats and spaces furthering the dialogue.” With these open discussions, Peréz Gayo and Maher open up their archive of data, keeping it alive.

Infrastructures for Participation

To my question, if their research includes an additional recommendation on the future of urban planning, Pérez Gayo answered: “It’s important for us to state that it is not our role, within an artistic research process, to deliver recommendations on the future of urban planning. However, we may contribute to the future of the area by revealing, visualizing, and making tangible the processes by which identities, social relationships, and power dynamics are produced and reproduced. We aim to use this material to open up a space for questioning that also prompts an active process of accountability on the impact and effects of design. We ask the question, how is design instrumentalized as a tool for the organization and management of bodies and identities? And as such, how does the act of design and designing contribute to physicalizing and inscribing in public space structural divisions across intersections of gender, sexual orientation, class, race, age, and body-ability, for instance.”

Even though Pérez Gayo’s and Maher’s residency is over, this process of dialogue is still going on. Coming May 28th, the two designers will publicly present their publication online, as a “new entry point into their body of research”. The exhibition “The Future of Strijp-S: Infrastructures for Participation”, where Pérez Gayo and Maher brought their research together as a continuation of their dialogues, will reopen for visitors again in June 2020.