 Most of all I collect, connect and interconnect local knowledge on global level. My favorite role is to be the catalyst between local communities, art and science. I use my artistic freedom to question our presumptions and manipulations that we accept, integrate and create in our daily lives. Who is in the position that determines and decides on the what and the why? What is important, what should be cherished and kept for future generations become part of our global heritage and may contribute to understanding the incomprehensible. Everybody is director and curator of a museum. When you visit people at home even if home is a simple shack in a refugee camp you find people surround themselves with the things they value most. When I ask you what you value most you may mention your family or that picture of your mother. So understanding collective is basically understanding your own values. What interests me most is the conceptual and contextual nature of contemporary arts. Not as a discourse within the domain of arts but as a dialogue interconnecting different fields of reflections on art, culture, heritage and society. There is never one story to tell. The former top-down approach shifts to a broader understanding more inclusive and based on social, artistic or scientific research in the how, why and when we construct the incomprehensible world around us. I would like to share some projects with you and follow it by an invitation for dialogue. In 2002 I was invited to investigate the perceptions of cultural identity of the residents in Ostwijk, the eastern part of a small Dutch town. An urban area consisting of 10,000 inhabitants of all social, economic levels and with multiple origins. The town mayor and the Turkish guest worker who sweeps the streets live in this small community. Quite a friendly urban area with no big issues. A place where you might consider living yourself. Interesting also because somehow this multi-layered community figured out a way to handle social differences. So how do they do it? What lessons are there to be learned? Starting from the concept that everybody is a director and curator of a museum I converted this urban neighborhood into museum Ostwijk. I shifted the established constructions of formal museums 180 degrees and stated that everybody and everything in this area is part of the collection of the museum. Old persons, young or old, their dreams, hopes, memories and expectations became part of the collection. Old houses, pets, crafts and knowledge became part of the collection. The inhabitants became the directors, curators and guides of the museum. I invited official artists, designers, radio makers and museology experts to work together with the inhabitants on research to disclose this collection. The inhabitants as inexperienced experts shared their expert insights in the neighborhood with official professionals trying to figure out the secret of their success of living together including all social and ethnic differences. Social inclusion as in accepting differences among people appeared the key word for this resilient community. Most important is that this project did not start with a preconceived notion of what to expect as an outcome but as an adventure recognizing the value of locals as experts to be able to create an inclusive dialogue with arts and science. After seven years we documented the whole project in a catalog that was spread house to house in all 3,500 households thus transferring the immaterial collection back to the community. The material collection was formally transferred to the city archive. 30% of all 10,000 inhabitants participated in one or more of the projects in the museum and recently the Oostwijk became an urban conservation area. If you're curious I brought some catalogs of several projects. Being invited to talk at museology conferences and in training or educational meetings resulted in the invitation of the city museum of Soutemire to help them out with a community collecting project called give and take. Soutemire is a new town and more or less exploded since the 60s from a village of 9,000 inhabitants to over 120,000 in 2008. The tiny city museum of Soutemire invited the locals to donate an object and a story about their sense of home to the museum. The interesting thing was that all donations became part of the city collection. 88 of donations were contributed. People came to the museum with their personal donation in a plastic shopping bank and the object and story was transferred and accepted by the curator after putting on the white protection gloves. I decided to publicly deconstruct the system of museums and museology. Every step in the process of an object and story being transferred into a museum object as part of a collection was researched within the museum spaces together with the locals and experts. Donators, artists, writers, philosophers and museology experts shared the process in four steps, the naked object, the talking object, object speed dating and beyond the object. In the first phase we focused on observation. What do you see when you look at an isolated object? In the second phase we focused on perception. How does a story add to the meaning of an object? In the third phase we focused on composition and cohesion. What do the audience objects and stories mean together? In the final phase centered around transformation. Has this public research of this community collection added meaning and understanding to the locals, the museum or the town? Thanks to the museology experts involved, the project resulted in a catalogue called 4289 as it became the final object of donation to the city collection of the Museum of Soutermere. 1,200 copies were spread to the donors and all museums, heritage and training institutions in the Netherlands. I described and documented the artistic contact of the whole project in the edge of the catalogue and online. I'd like to share with you some thoughts that came from these projects. Let me introduce the third project about the anthropogenic collection on coastal transitions, collecting the intangible and the concept of innovative heritage, connecting past with present and future. In this concept heritage is dynamic. Heritage itself is an actor in the process of change and innovation. In 2006 I co-founded Satellite Group, an artist run initiative that explores through arts and culture how the sea and waterways influence cities, people, communities and environments. Our aim is to enhance public and professional awareness on coastal transitions. Ocean seas and coastal regions are under tremendous pressure worldwide. What triggered this initiative was the lack of involvement of arts and culture in the master plans for coastal transitions in the Netherlands. As you may know, the Netherlands is a country mostly below sea level with expert skills of water management and with a world famous artistic tradition. The continuing need for coastal defense due to rising sea level in past, present and future is important to everyone. Reflections on the past teaches that the great flood in the southern parts of the Netherlands in 1953 instigated 60 years of Delta Works, building dykes and dams now called Building Against Nature. This project has recently been completed. As a result of building dykes, we put extra pressure on the coast resulting, among other things, in a disbalance in salt and sweet water. So we made recently a complete turnaround in the way that we now provide the sea as a partner to help shape the coastal protection of the Netherlands. With sand we put in front of the shores. This is called the sand engine, building with nature rather than building against nature. Sand is a future strategy for coastal protection. It contributes to our most innovative heritage and is the newest Dutch export product. This shift from Holocene area in which nature was the force for changes to the Anthropocene era in which man affects and even directs nature is a tremendous conceptual shift. This picture shows a grandmother playing with her grandson on the beach in Scheveningen. The sand they play with is put there for coastal protection. On the right you see the boulevard which is actually a dike in boulevard for coastal protection. And in the background you can see the derelict bankrupt pier as a relic of former touristic progress and nostalgia and contemporary competing coastal destinies. The Dutch national flag completes the picture. Culture is in essence questioning the why and how we negotiate between experiencing and understanding the world that surrounds us. How do we position ourselves in the context of family and heritage, roots and with thoughts even shape our future aims? Every day we post these questions when we raise our children. What beliefs and rituals do we install in educating the young? What stories do we tell and how do we manipulate these stories about our origins and presumed identities? How do we connect to these issues in contact with the people that matter to us? What make-believe worlds do we instill in the young, the future generations that will follow us? Do you know the Truman story? That one morning he wakes up and discovers he lives in a bubble? The Dutch are so good in reshaping nature to make the coast appear as a natural landscape while in fact it's a cultural man-made landscape. With the prospect of climate change, rising sea levels, shrinking land, disbalance of salt and sweet water, rivers either to full or empty, we face major coastal transitions. Transitions in spatial and economical sense that may lead to conflict and strangements, loss of heritage and loss of more informal cultural uses of public coastal space. Our long-term projects of Satellite Group are BATGAST, Artisan Residency Program at the coast of the Hague-Schreveningen and now wakes to see the International Exchange Residency Program in collaboration with international cultural partners in coastal communities abroad. BATGAST is built by recycle architect Riefenck. Young Corbis is also part of the conference. With one and a half stacked used shipping container in the middle of an urban beach community called FAST. In both projects, Artisan Residencies are used as research method. The program enables artists and scientists to do field work and to work on site with local partners, coastal communities and experts in order to map out and research the current status of coastal transitions and to generate new narratives and perspectives. During these residency projects, new works, both conceptual and documentary, are developed that reflect upon the complex and layered social and environmental developments of coastal transitions. The Artisan Residency Program functions as an alternative source for collecting. Satellite Group collects the intangible local knowledge derived from the artistic and scientific projects. During these residency programs, new works and concepts are developed that we connect and contextualize with existing works for public events like traveling film festivals, exhibitions, workshops, and presentations at expert conferences. By interconnecting coastal communities, arts and science, we share local knowledge on global level. We gain sustainable insights on coastal transitions that transcend local and national issues. One of our projects is to develop the online platform of the Entrepreneurial Coastal Atlas that in time may merge with the scientific coastal atlases of ICANN, the International Coastal Atlas Network. We also aim to develop BATGAST 2.0, a vibrant collective hub connecting society, arts and science, pioneers and policymakers with future challenges of water and energy for inspiration, critical dialogue, production, presentation, and education. We research the phenomena of living below sea level in a polder with an interpretive community and subjective cartography. Once a dangerous inner sea, then a polder with an innovation of steam engines followed by the Stelling of Amsterdam listed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, you now land at Schiphol Airport in the middle of a supposed safe suburbia. For instance, every year we need 20 to 40 million cubic meters of fresh water to flush the salt out of the polder to be able to grow vegetables or feed the animals. Also, huge areas are designated to flood when the rivers are too full. Slow art and slow curating. So our aim is to raise public and professional awareness on coastal transitions. For instance, we have built a permanent public exhibition on the boulevard of Scheveningen. The boulevard is visited by 12 million people each year. We try to raise professional awareness on coastal transitions by participating in international coastal conferences or international museology conferences. We also raise both public and professional awareness with interactive public programs. After eight years, we are now invited to work with the Dutch government, scientists and engineers to link cultural perception and experience with scientific knowledge and vision. So if we reflect on this talk up to now in my professional experiences these last decades, does it essentially deal with the shifts of the concept of art and proposes a new role in defining culture and heritage? I describe these shifts mostly as circles. The first inner circle is art as object and refers to the tangible qualities of artworks. Art works as objects that have a defined material shape like a statue or a painting. A work of art can be described by title, artist, date, size, materials, etc. In search it could refer to autonomous art in which the intentional meaning of the artist is sacred. Art and context is the second circle around the first and refers to artworks that no longer consist of a divine shape in space. This can reach as far as that the object as material shape itself is dissolved in an environmental work of art and is even made for that purpose. The third circle encompasses the other two. I call this art and audience and it refers not only to conceptual art but also to the sense that the object as material shape is non-existent and the senses of the audience are evoked by intangible experiences. Now the fourth circle, or cloud as you may also call it, may be art as context. In my opinion it refers to the concept of art that no longer deals with the objects themselves but with a collective of intangible. In this construct we accept that art is subject to timely reflections and interpretations in as much as that the intentional meaning of the artist's maker are no longer exclusive but inclusive and subject to changes, interpretations, manipulations, etc. So yes, I think art can contribute to new concepts of heritage, museums, collections and society. Lately I post that heritage has a new connotation. Heritage is not something only to be smartly managed and maintained like the English meaning of innovate heritage. It is not human culture versus nature but it is an active cyclic system of understanding like Newton stated, action is minus reaction. Innovatory heritage is alive and kicking. Heritage itself is actor in process of change and innovation. So maybe you can help me out. Our international collaboration with Nieder-Art Colony in Lithuania focused my attention to UNESCO World Heritage. Nieder-Art Colony is located on the Curonian Spit and is on the cultural list of UNESCO World Heritage. Now the what I say in the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark is on the natural UNESCO World Heritage list while both exist because of the interaction between man and nature. So how about contemporary heritage? The latest innovation in the Netherlands is the sand engine as I already explained as building with nature. A contemporary cultural statement in the Anthropocene area we now live in. In connecting paths with present, the sand engine is built with sand from the bottom of the North Sea and as in a time machine, you can find man-made fossils on the sand engine and also connecting present and future as a sand engine is built to disappear. So as an art project, I would like to propose to enlist the sand engine as new and innovative heritage for UNESCO World Heritage. As a new narrative of the relations between man and nature, both cultural and natural, both tangible and intangible. An innovative heritage, as it changes our perception of heritage as dynamic, meant to change and to trigger changes and innovations. Arts, culture and heritage are dynamic. It's the world we all create together. It's a construction of interpretations of histories, peoples' tales and beliefs. It is the way of expressing how we stand in life, in society and the way we negotiate between issues that matter to us. History and memory are adaptable to the time frame we live in. In that sense, heritage and culture as a manifestation of what is, what was is and what will be, as a timely interpretation may even be a necessity to survive. I would like to thank you for your attention and I would please like to start the discussion on how the sand engine could possibly be listed on the World Heritage UNESCO list. Thank you. Maybe you have any questions to the speaker? I hope so. This one. In this case, we would like to... Denise has a question. I'm fixing the microphone. Sorry. A very small question. Just to clarify, the work that you showed where someone was swimming, the name of that, it looks like a canal, a polder. Yeah, a polder. What is a polder? It is a typical Dutch invention. Most of the Netherlands is built below sea level. So there used to be mostly swamps, half of the Netherlands. So we started building small dikes with mud to be able to make parts of the land dry. But we did that also on a large scale and so we have a whole system of, you could call it irrigation canals. Ah, okay. Only it is not so much to bring water in the polder as to bring it out. Yeah, so it's a channel to get rid of the water. It's a whole system of canals, of ditches. I didn't know they would call that. I've seen them, but I'm sorry. I was unaware. No, that is... And just another... I mean, a wonderful expose of so many great projects. It's clear. It's very, very active and obviously very well supported. Okay. Or you fight hard for that support. There's another observation that I had and that was the wonderful term that you use, sweet water. Oh yeah, it's called fresh water. Okay, yeah, because we would say fresh water, but I think that notion of sweet water is... Yeah, it makes it stronger. Very, very strong, very positive statement about it because that's the kind of water we can live on. Yeah. Yeah, I thought that was quite a lovely thing. Anyway, I'm very interested. Thank you. More questions? Thank you for a really interesting presentation. I'm quite interested in what you seem to have presented as a real expanded sense of heritage in a real contemporary sense. Landscape management becomes a way of thinking through our relationship to the world. And the projects that you've been involved in in making everybody a collector and the houses and people's everyday objects as collections. And I want to ask this question from a genuine position of not understanding, so forgive me if it sounds critical and I don't mean it to be. In England, one of our writers on heritage, Rodney Harrison, has said we have a crisis in heritage. I think Lervin Tal has talked about the same thing about the accretion and the expansion of things like UNESCO labelling things as heritage. What are the implications for the idea of forgetting or the sense of too many things becoming heritage? What are the implications of this becoming heritage? Is there anything that you think shouldn't be heritage? I guess should something be delisted to allow this to become listed? I guess I'm just interested in this idea of forgetting and expansion of what we think of as heritage. No, as such, I myself am not dealing with objects at all. It's all in digital formats, either videos, pictures, texts, whatever. And in the Netherlands we have quite a reputation for this heritage also objects. So they get out of the museums or put even on internet, like for sale. And that of course raised a big discussion but I think it's essential because sometimes there are like a hundred boats of the same type and period. So you had better choose which one do we want to keep and the other ones had better go somewhere else maybe to another collection or even a private collection. Yeah, we are accumulating a lot of stuff. The warehouses are amazing. Time for our last question. Hi, thanks for that. I just caught the end. I'm so sorry I missed the beginning. In answer to your question at the end, I'm talking this afternoon about the Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site where I've been running an arts program and one of the legacy projects. From that is an arts project about erosion because what makes the World Heritage Site a World Heritage Site is the fact that it moves and changes. So I'm just wondering if that's useful information. Yeah, good. You're giving your talk like this afternoon? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll participate. I'm really curious. I want to just pay attention that Jacqueline brought catalogs and the time for our next speaker. Okay, thank you.