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‘The whole point of this project is to open up an exploratory debate which puts our ideas of national identity at risk and examines or challenges the processes of inclusion and exclusion in The Netherlands today. As questions of cultural identity and normative ‘national’ values become ever more of an issue in political and cultural debate, the concept behind Be[com]ing Dutch is to move the agenda of so-called multiculturalism on from notions of toleration and difference towards building a shared but agonistic democracy on the cultural level. To do this we need to use the institutions we have remaining in the public sphere – of which a city art museum is still a crucial part. Be[com]ing Dutch will attempt to look at the meaning of and context for a global visual culture right here (Eindhoven) and right now (2006-2008). The museum is proposed as the meeting ground in this context. It will reverse the idea of multiculturalism as an imported situation through immigration or globalisation, instead developing new ways of understanding diversity, through its lived local reality in a Dutch city.’

‘Could we speculate for a moment? What if we take the fabulous excesses of the 21st century fascism’s argument at face value? What if we imagine that the Muslims are the conquerors? That Amsterdam has turned into Little Ankara and Rotterdam into Little Tangier? That Arabic was the language of the street in downtown Eindhoven? What if this all came to pass? What would the natives do, estranged in their own land? What sort of resistance would they mount, if any? Would they just give up and hit the bottle? Would they want to pass on some things to the vanquishers of a dying civilisation? Would they try to cajole the victors into seeing the worth of their own values, trying to preserve something of their history, mix up or modify “them” through “us”? What would “we Europeans” understand as our legacy to a world that no longer places us in the top position? Would our Europeanism turn introverted and nostalgic or militant and fundamentalist? What would we, in these circumstances, want to become? It is in the light of such questions and the thoughts that they provoke that we need to understand a project like Be[com]ing Dutch. In facing various possible futures, even at this level of absurdity, we might understand cultural identity as being in flight and full of possibility.’

‘Well first and foremost we would totally reject the idea that’s we are developing an integration course. We want argue against there being a kind of fixed sense of Dutchness into which somehow one could shoehorn oneself and then become ‘normal’ and integrated. This project argues rather that our very location here in the Netherlands allows for a variety of interpretations of this category of Dutchess and that’s this new dutchness could be transformative and could change us all, everybody. The point is that it’s the “Dutchness” (or “Americaness” or what ever) that has to change, this requires new models of thinking and a departure from the notion of tolerance that permeated society here for so long here. Toleration presupposes that difference is okay as long as its does not contaminate or effect another’s position or identity, this means effectively that’s we are all co existing under sufferance of the majority population until it decides that it tolerates that difference no longer. That’s is a very precarious ways of existing and developing as a society. As for Eindhoven, we think the provinces is a richer field of identity politics than representative cities in the centre. There is less at stake in defining Dutchness here – which is anyway challenged by traditions of Brabantness or Catholic identity – than in hardcore Holland. So, being in the disregarded south of the Dutch state gives us more room to manoeuvre and more chance also of reaching a diverse audience, given that everything is on a smaller, more intimate scale.’

‘Yes, we want change! The whole idea is not to try and solve everything or to answer all the questions straight away. The world has changed radically after 1989 and we can’t judge the possibilities of global interconnectedness right now. In a way it would be pointless to embark on this project with an answer in mind then we could just make a show now about diversity.’

‘To produce artworks that ask about this most crucial question of our time. For artists, that’s a huge challenge but an appropriate one for a museum like ours to issue, given our history. The project also uses the infrastructures of art, its much vaunted “freedom”, its finance, its avant-garde inheritance of saying the otherwise unsayable, to say something that we feel is important. Next year, after the series of debates, the museum wil present a final presentation, in which artists will present their research, which partly took place in Eindhoven.’

‘We were happy that people understood they were engaging in a process, rather than a statement from the artists or museum. The dictionary is a work in progress. It is called ons woordenboek and we have taken a bunch of terms that recurred over the gatherings and given our definitions. The dictionary will be also launched this summer on our website so people can offer new meanings, edit ours or suggest new terms.’

‘We have three themes which we want to look at: the reinvention of nationalism set against the fact of global immigration; the revival of religious wars against the secular globalization of capital; and autonomous art practice against socially and politically engaged art. We are planning to invite people like Boris Groys, Frederic Jameson, Gayatri Sprivak, Orhan Pamuk, Chantal Mouffe, Tone ‘O Nielsen, Homi K. Bhabha, Sudeep Dasgupta, Yto Barrada, Roger Buergel to debate about the issues.’