CELEBRATE DIVERSITY

The performance ‘celebrate diversity’ tries to visualise different layers within the demographic situation of Eindhoven. For a period of ten days we drove around with flags of the 10 most common nationalities in the city of Eindhoven. The performance was documented from inside the car. The video documentated the reactions of the people in the street. During our performance it became clear that every ‘celebrated’ culture resulted in different responses. We got the most aggressive responses on the German flag. The Moroccan and Turkish community responded very spontaneous on their own flags, while some (especially) young Dutch men were obviously upset. In general the responses on the Surinam and Belgium flags were positive. Most of the Dutch citizens ignored their own national symbol and we question how many people recognized the Indonesian flag. The Chinese seemed to be the most reserved and the flags of the United Kingdom gave people a reason to stare. A selection of responses is presented in a video.

Population of Eindhoven according to national origin (top 10, 2007)

1 the Netherlands: 152578
2 Turkey: 9649
3 Indonesia: 6406
4 Germany: 5510
5 Morocco: 5266
6 Surinam: 3635
7 Belgium: 2698
8 the Netherlands Antilles: 2397
9 China: 2174
10 United Kingdom: 1375