Eindhoven Idioms

A short assignment for Forum with instructor Danielle Arets at the Design Academy Eindhoven:
Come up with a new slogan (or an anti-slogan) for Eindhoven:

• Try to think of a promotion campaign to embed this slogan in a series of activities
• Your slogan/ campaign has to be based on some research; what is the creatieve [sic] DNA of the city; historical traces, industrial roots etc
• The slogan has to be presented by an ‘elevator pitch’ a short, flashy presentation with which you can convince the municipality of Eindhoven.

I researched some histories of Eindhoven, then tried out some subversive slogans and campaigns, as well as some purely promotional ones, and decided on a more ambiguous approach using common English idioms that could be related to different historical and contemporary events in the city that could then be interpreted as both positive and negative; as both events of pride and shame and, as an end goal, start discussions that ultimately reduce any false sense of pride while simultaneously enjoying a sort of honest and multi-voiced sense of community to build upon for the future. The approach also needs to take into account the general perception of a city considered by many outside Eindhoven (and many within, actually) to be a sort of working class redneck cultural backwater built on the back of one company, a football (soccer) team and a lot of drinking establishments.
The following slides were presented in class to fellow students, half of whom are foreigners and none of whom are actually from Eindhoven. The presentation first gives examples of how the idioms might initially be portrayed throughout the city as sort of semi-subversive PSAs. The second half of the presentation outlines how these idioms might be interpreted through historical events such as, in the 20th C., the elimination of the Gender River, the post-war public humiliation (by cutting off their hair) of women who had had affairs with Nazi-occupying soldiers, and the reclamation (yet overall decline) of the St. Catharine’s Church from Protestant to Catholic hands. Finally, the campaign could be tied to an interactive online component, allowing citizens to create Eindhoven-related content that they felt a particular idiom spoke to.




















The presentation itself went well. I was succinct, clear, spoke loudly and generated some discussion afterwards, in particular about the fact that I was the most positive about the city (even though the idioms were ambivalent). Some criticism of myself, however: the fact that such a campaign is kind of derivative (see work by Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer, or general hipster and culture jamming campaigns of late); that it’s too much to expect any large percentage of the public to 1) actually notice the idioms around town and 2) actually take interest enough to both remember the URL and actually visit the URL and actually contribute to the URL; that the relationship between location and idiom wasn’t always strong; and the fact that I didn’t bother to research any Dutch idioms.
Download the original screen-res PDF: Eindhoven Idioms: Ambivalent public discourse (1.3 MB).