DICTIONARY

Our Dictionary is one of the projects developed as part of the two year programme. After our first public meeting The Gatherings last January it became clear that even the terms used during our conversations were at times limited or simply open to many interpretations. We decided to make a dictionary in order to clarify or propose necessary terms.

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politics: Politics is the process by which groups of people make decisions. It is the authoritative allocation of values. Although the term is generally applied to behaviour within governments, politics is observed in all human group interactions, including corporate, academic, and religious institutions. We would like to consider how art can contribute to and re-imagine politics and take our lead in this respect from Jacques Rancière. He explains "Art is not political owing to the messages and feelings that it carries on the state of social and political issues. It is not political owing to the way it represents social structures, conflicts, or identities. It is political by virtue of the very distance that it takes with regard to those functions." Art may be able to let us imagine politics differently.
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participation: We would like to think about participation in terms of audience and to transform the audience from passive viewers of objects into active participators in the discourses and knowledges which art produces in the museum. This suggests that the museum could also be transformed from the distributor and displayer of established or fixed artistic expressions to a more dynamic role of catalyst or host for a collaborative exploration and interpretation with its community and with artists.
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dutch: Dutch can be understood as a language collectively used in a variety of places including the Netherlands, Flanders in Belgium, Aruba, the Dutch Antilles, etc. It is also understood to describe a national identity. Using this word in our title is not to insist on a national identity but rather to explore how vibrant and diverse this category can be while at the same time accurately locating us as living together right here and right now in a particular region of the world. We want to imagine Dutch as a term implying diversity, which describes and includes all of our community at all times and stretches beyond its legal and national limits.
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nationality: Nationality affords the state jurisdiction over the person, and affords the person the protection of the state. Conversely if one does not have the ‘appropriate’ nationality in certain states one does not necessarily have protection. We want to consider nationality not in order to accept the limits of the term but rather to engage with the fact that we live in a real concrete legal political situation in which we are governed subjects. What the notion of the nation state and nationality includes, assumes, evokes and negates are all points of interest for us in this project.
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nationalism: Nationalism, in its broadest sense, is a devotion to one’s own nation and its interests over those of all other nations. The term can also refer to a doctrine or political movement that holds that a nation - usually defined in terms of ethnicity or culture - has the right to constitute an independent or autonomous political community based on a shared history and common destiny. The quest for national hegemony has inspired millennia of imperialism and colonisation, while struggles for national liberation have resulted in many revolutions. In modern times, the nation-state has become the dominant form of societal organization.
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