The Community Centre: Forms of FellowshipThe Community Centre: Forms of Fellowship

This conversation will commence from rare fragments of news reports and documentaries from the time about this experimental community centre. This point of departure leads to speculations on current and future forms of collectivity and cohabitation. Is the agora - a shared physical space for assembly and discussion - missing in our current polarised and atomised society? Does democracy exist by virtue of physical social contact? How can 'the design of the social' enable such physical interaction? Or can democracy flourish through digital interaction alone?

The talk will be followed by a screening of Wendelien van Oldenborgh's Beauty and the Right to the Ugly (2014), about 't Karregat. Visitors are welcome to have a look at the related Community Centre room in our current exhibition Designing the Social. Entrance to the exhibition is free during the Thursday Night Live!.

Social Talks is the Thursday Night Live! series around the exhibition Designing the Social: 100 years of idiosyncratic living in the Netherlands. Designing the Social is a multi-year exhibition that examines how Dutch society has been redesigned over the past century. Often, it turns out to have been committed citizens who devised radical design strategies. This can be seen in a series of installations about the 'community centre', minimum dwellling, De Ploeg weaving mill, the design strategies of the second feminist wave, the squatters' movement, and digital pioneers. For each theme, separate teams of curators, researchers and designers have investigated the connections between archival research and current social issues.

Wendelien van Oldenborgh develops works, whereby the cinematic format is used as a methodology for production and as the basic language for various forms of presentation, collaborating with participants in different scenarios, to co-produce the script. Recent solo presentations include: work, work, work (work) at Museum Sztuki in Lodz 2021; tono lengua boca at Fabra i Coats, Barcelona 2020 and CA2M Madrid 2019-20; Cinema Olanda, at the Dutch Pavilion in the 57th Venice Biennial 2017. Van Oldenborgh has exhibited widely including the Chicago Architecture Biennial 2019, bauhaus imaginista, HKW Berlin 2019, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam 2020 and Sonsbeek20->24, Arnhem 2021. Van Oldenborgh is a member of the (Dutch) Society for Arts and a recipient of the Dr. A.H. Heineken Prize for Art (2014). A monographic publication, Amateur, was published by Sternberg Press, Berlin; If I Can't Dance, Amsterdam and The Showroom, London in 2016.

Uta Eisenreich is an artist and visual researcher who incorporates a photographic practice with performative strategies. She is best known for her photographic still lives that trigger viewers to discern underlying patterns, and that refer to scientific experiments, spiritual arrangements, psychological assessment tests. She has published two artist books, A not B (2010, Roma Publications) and As If (2021, Roma Publications) on issues of analogy and representation and has exhibited related works in solo shows at Ellen de Bruijne Projects (AS IF, 2021), Unseen (2021), Kunstmuseum The Hague (This, That and Other, 2017). Another branch of her work focuses on social interaction, conditions and underlying structures of living together. For the exhibition Designing the Social, at Het Nieuwe Instituut, she researched the community centres of Frank van Klingeren and contributed a video installation for Het Buurthuis developed in collaboration with Johanna Himmelsbach. Other works in this line of research were presented at GfzK Leipzig (Gaudiopolis 2018), Centre Pompidou, Paris (Networks 2022).

Piet Vollaard (1955) is educated at TU Delft (Faculty of Architecture, 1984) and works as an architect, architecture critic, urban activist and a promotor/project initiator of nature-inclusive design and urban nature. He was co-founder/director of ArchiNed, the architecture website of the Netherlands (1996-2013). He is currently active in and co-founder of The Natural City (urban nature projects, 2012-present) and City in the Making (co-housing and alternative, unconventional programming of vacant urban property, 2012-present). His publications include: Herman Haan, architect (1995), _Hinder en Ontklontering, Architectuur en Maatschappij in het werk van Frank van Klingeren _(with Marina van den Bergen, 2003), _Stadsnatuur Maken / Making Urban Nature _(with Jacques Vink and Niels de Zwarte, 2017) and several architecture guides from 1987 onwards.