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Meeting Grounds

public space in a common time and place

Onomatopee 190

Welcome to Meeting Grounds,

In the physical form of a mobile trailer, Meeting Grounds operates as an assembly point to collectivity explore, articulate and question the current functions of planned urban space, shared public resources and technological advancements in the city of Eindhoven. In doing so, this year-long programme of meet-ups and events intends to activate the social and ethical foundations of the sites in which we enjoy our cultural lives and to establish common ground in doing so.

Meeting Grounds seeks to map the numerous networks of community, grassroots initiatives that exist within the city and support connections between individuals, organizations and communities and encouraging self-organisation and co-creation in order to nurture the texture of our social life within our interconnected city.

By combining the everyday, lived experiences of Eindhoven’s diverse range of locals with experts from both inside and outside of the city, we wish to engage with the pressing social issues of today. We have selected three locations of activation: the Eindhoven Public Library, Strijp-S and Het Kloosterbos Community Garden to explore ideas of publicness, connectivity and shared public spaces. For the public library we seek to understand what a library can offer a public both as a knowledge resource but also as a shared, communal space. With Strijp-S we investigate its ongoing journey between publicness and privatisation, alongside the use of public squares and spaces that support social, political and economic means and the invisible boundaries this can create. Finally, with Het Kloosterbos, we investigate the relationship between the urban and the rural and how movements such as guerilla gardening and neighborhood gardening can be seen as ways of occupying space, building self-sufficient communities and providing tools of resistance.

For each individual location we will park the Meeting Grounds trailer in the vicinity of the space and offer a full programme of expert-talks, workshops, reading groups and informal meet-ups across the three months of the trailers’ residency, that each explore key themes raised by each location. Through such programming we wish to stimulate and strengthen relations within an increasingly planned and information-dense city. In doing so we will collaboratively expand beyond just the location itself into the lived experiences, habitual uses and needs of all of our city-neighbors, aided by drawing upon fiction, experimentation, criticism, cartography and more.

The ideas and conversations exchanged within these meet-ups will be documented through different formats and released around the city in freely available zine publications.

By using meet-ups as its very core, Meeting Grounds provides an ever curious, socially facing and evolving hosting space where the city can be both figuratively and literally dissected and reconnected through a multitude of voices, experiences and perspectives from various backgrounds, specialisms and interactions. All connected by their relationship to the city of Eindhoven.

You are welcomed to help shape this shared space within our remarkable city.

Key Questions of Meeting Grounds

  • What is public space in Eindhoven?
  • How do we build communities through space and place?
  • What can material and immaterial interventions in public space show us or teach us?
  • Who or what controls how we navigate cities and spaces?

Images from Meeting Grounds Edition One: The Public Library

Images from Meeting Grounds Edition 2: Goes Online & Meeting Grounds Goes Online exhibition

Images below taken from Paloma Garcia’s workshop SPECULATIVE CARTOGRAPHIES as part of Meeting Grounds Edition 3: Strijp-S.

Please visit this link to view the full outcome of the workshop.

Images from Mechteld Jungerius’s workshop Designing Public Space by Unraveling Affective Cultural Heritage as part of Meeting Grounds Edition 3: Strijp-S

Images taken from the finissage event for Meeting Grounds Edition Four: The Community Garden.

Image credits: Elena Denisa Lupoiu Lupoiu

Agenda

Publication

Onomatopee 190.1, Amy Gowen, 2020

Meeting Grounds Reader One: The Public Library

€ 10

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For this first of four locations of activation, Meeting Grounds has chosen the public library. A space that offers access to sites of conviviality, a multitude of knowledge resources and points of representation for diverse publics.

The Meeting Grounds Reader intends to continue the work of the Meeting Grounds Edition 1 program in exploring the key functions of library environments. To understand their value both as physical and symbolic spaces and to further investigate the cultural importance of the library as a public space that forms a meeting ground for the city.

 

Including contributions by Lieven Lahaye, Simon Browne, Pedro Sa Couto, Claire O'Brien, Pauline Augustoni, Juliana Laguna Bosch (The Wave), Jasper Eikmeier, Pleun Verhees

Dimensions
130 x 175 mm / 5 x 3 inches (portrait)
Pages
80
ISBN
none
Editor
Amy Gowen
Author
Lieven Lahaye, Simon Browne, Claire O'Brien, Pauline Augustoni, Juliana Laguna Bosch (The Wave), Jasper Eikmeier, Pleun Verhees
Graphic
Wibke Bramesfeld
Language
English
Release date
20200710
Paper
90 grams EOS
Color
Blue and black Riso
Printer
Onoamtopee's Risograph ME9350E, printed by Wibke
Font
Source Sans Pro, Clone Rounded Latin
Image specs
20 duotone images
Details
including a number of inserts
Assistent
Lieke Tijink
Made possible by
Cultuur Eindhoven, Provincie Noord-Brabant, Mondriaan stichting
more specs
Onomatopee 190.3, Amy Gowen, 2021

Meeting Grounds Reader Two: Strijp-S

€ 10

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Meeting Grounds Reader Two: Strijp-S

 

Meeting Grounds is a year-long artistic project initiated by City Curator Amy Gowen, that operates as an assembly point to collectively articulate, explore and question the role of public space in the city of Eindhoven. Facilitated on a programme and publication basis, Meeting Grounds uses a range of meetups, workshops, talks and events to activate the sites in which we enjoy our social, political and cultural lives. Aiming to establish common grounds in doing so.
The second Meeting ­Grounds location of activation was Strijp-S. A compelling yet complex composite public domain that bridges public and private, tangible and intangible and space and non-space. 

To situate this active inquiry directly within the city of Eindhoven, Meeting Grounds organised a month-long programme exploring Strijp-S, previously referred to as “a state within the city”, and more recently known as the city’s most “multi-functional urban area”, as a site of industrial-cultural heritage. In doing so we wished to investigate the multiple histories of the area whilst examining its more recent identity as a home for technology and innovation. In conducting this research, Meeting Grounds formed collaborations with a number of respected Architects, Designers and Researchers including Paolo Patelli and Giuditta Vendrame, Paloma García García , Mechteld Jungerius and Chiara Dalla Libera.

 

Meeting Grounds Reader Two: Strijp-S intends to continue the work of this Edition programme to further explore Strijp-S’s complicated relationship with public and private space and its contribution to the tangible and intangible cultural histories of Eindhoven. 

 

With contributions from: Chiara Dalla Libera, Paloma García García, Amy Gowen, Mechteld Jungerius, Andy Norstrom

Type
Softcover
Dimensions
130 x 175 mm / 5 x 3 inches (portrait)
Pages
72
ISBN
none
Editor
Amy Gowen
Author
Chiara Dalla Libera, Paloma García García, Amy Gowen, Mechteld Jungerius, Andy Norstrom
Graphic
Wibke Bramesfeld
Language
English
Release date
20210129
Paper
inside: EOS 2.0 90gr Cover: EOS 2.0 120gr
Color
Green and Grey Risocolor
Printer
Onoamtopee's Risograph ME9350E
Font
Source Sans Pro, Clone Rounded Latin
Image specs
24 duotone images
Production assistant
Demi van Venrooij
more specs
Onomatopee 190.2, Amy Gowen, 2021

Meeting Grounds: On Locality, Community, Connection & Care

On Locality, Community, Connection and Care

€ 12

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Meeting Grounds is an artistic project that seeks to explore the formation of community and our changing perceptions towards publicness through the medium of public space. The project grew in resonance as global phenomena including the pandemic and divisive cultural politics increasingly determined our ability to access certain spaces, and urged us to rethink our relationships to space, place and community; alongside the values we assign to each. 
 
The Meeting Grounds programme of online, participatory events that took place from March to June 2020, at the height of the first wave of the pandemic, sought to examine this limited access, whilst simultaneously exploring the new spaces of community we have produced in response. This resulting publication features the work of 35 selected artists, researchers, designers and writers who took part in the programme. The Meeting Grounds publication therefore acts as a continuation of the ideas and conversations exchanged during this time period as well as an exploration into the social, political and cultural changes that have occurred since the beginning of 2020. In doing so, it hopes to unravel our evolving relationships with space and place, the effects these changes have had on our bodily behaviours, habitual practices and movements and the ways in which we recognise, form and maintain locality, community, connection and care.
Type
Softcover
Dimensions
120 x 170 mm portrait
Pages
140
ISBN
9789493148611
Editor
Amy Gowen
Author
Amy Gowen, Amy Pekal, Eva Jack, Floriane Grosset, Katarina Sidorova, Anna-Maria Michael, Brogen Berwick
Graphic
Studio Bramesfeld / Wibke Bramesfeld, Graphic Assistant: Demi van Venrooij
Artist
Riitta Oittinen, Gilles Dedecker, Jess Henderson, Jorne Visser, Tamás Kondor, Alexandra Fraser, Roberta Cesani, Lenn Cox, Melle Hammer, Emily Herbert, Jonathon Johnson, Anna Weberberger, Myriam Gras, Cleo Broda, Maaike Twisk, Ronald Nijhof, Ola Korbanska, Zoie Kasper, Quentin Gaudry, Jodie Winter, Chiara Zilioli, Claudia Hackett, Gina Moen, Jolien De Nijs, Lewis Duckworth
Language
English
Release date
20210531
Binding
Sewn & glued
Paper
Inside: Nautilus Classic recycled 90g Cover: Nautilus Classic recycled 250g
Edition
500
Color
4/4 CMYK
Printer
Printon, Estonia
Font
Clone Rounded & Source Sans Pro
Image specs
52 Images in full Colour
Details
Debossed Cover
Editorial assistant
Lieke Tijink
Text editor
Amy Gowen
Curator
Amy Gowen
Made possible by
Mondriaan Fonds, Cultuur Eindhoven, Provincie Noord Brabant
more specs
Onomatopee 190.4, Amy Gowen, 2021

Meeting Grounds Reader Four: The Community Garden

€ 10.00

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"Gardens are collective spaces that are continually shaped, maintained and cared for by their users, particularly over time but also through acts of nurturing and care. Community gardens can therefore be seen as the embodiment of a “place as process”.1 An ever-shifting constellation of trajectories and possibilities, and a representation of the thrown-togetherness of beings, temporalities, realities and experiences. Their sites provide alternate forms for social relations and introduce more sustainable and ethical forms of living and working together. In turn enriching individual autonomy and community cohesion in the process. They hold the potential to construct new forms of knowledge and participation that are open and non-exclusionary, reflecting locality in all of its multiple and overlapping forms, from residents themselves to local customs, cultures, governances, climates and geographies."

 

For the final of its four locations of activation, Meeting Grounds has chosen the community garden, in collaboration with local, community food forest Het Kloosterbos. The Meeting Grounds Reader intends to continue the work of the Meeting Grounds Edition 4 program in exploring the key functions of community gardens in creating vital social and “use” spaces for the city, as well as forming foundations for living and being together based on care methodologies and commoning practices, to understand their value both as physical and symbolic spaces and as sites for the exchange of knowledges, histories and experiences across Eindhoven and beyond.

 

Including contributions from Anna Mareschal de Charentenay, Anna Maria Fink, Amy Gowen, Amy Pekal, Cécile Empinasse, Claire Matthews, Gaja Pegan Nahtigal, The Garden Department (Angela Jerardi, Amalie Jensen, Lente Oosterhuis, Nils Norman, Rowe Carpaij, Virginia Vivaldi, Vitor Altschul), Hugo Pilate, Kate Price, Leo Bacx on behalf of Het Kloosterbos, Marie Verdeil, Martina Eddone & Noor Bootsma. 

Type
Zine
Pages
130 x 175 mm / 5 x 3 inches (portrait)
ISBN
None
Language
English
Release date
20210601
Binding
Elastic band
Paper
90 grams EOS 2.0
Edition
250
Color
Orange and teal Riso
Printer
Riso ME9350E
Font
Source Sans Pro, Clone Rounded Latin
Image specs
70
more specs
Onomatopee 190, Amy Gowen, 2021

Meeting Grounds special (3 zines, 1 booklet)

normal price 42 euro, 27 euro as package deal!

€ 27

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PEOPLE INVOLVED IN THIS PROJECT AND ALL THE ROLES THESE PEOPLE EVER HAD IN ONOMATOPEE PROJECTS