This research proposal focuses on the position of the museum of modern and contemporary art in the age of globalization. A central question is how the museum describes its role in society in relation to processes and issues of globalization and the globalization of the art world, and how this thinking is given form in their policies, specifically in their collection presentations. The research opens up a space for comparison. Starting with an analysis of the most important aspects of globalization in relation to museums of modern and contemporary art, the research aims to study histories and collections of a number of specifically selected museums, including current idea formation within these organizations, tendencies in their collections, collection displays, and interpretations. An important aspect of the research consists of interviews with leading representatives of these museums, which will produce a body of work that conjures up a broader perspective of how globalization is taken up in different museums in different ways.

Climate justice is hampered by a lack of awareness and consensus on actions. Offering imaginative scenarios and unconventional approaches, Art & Artistic Research enhance awareness and empower people to move from awareness to action. JUST ART mobilises this potential for a climate just future in the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

Brazilian coffee beans, erotic perfumes, sulphuric acid, ozone, incense and industrial fumes: during the avant-garde these and other smells were considered powerful means to address the audience in direct and provocative ways. Symbolists, Futurists, Dadaists and Surrealists, such as Raoul Hausmann, Marcel Duchamp and F.T. Marinetti. deliberately engaged the sense of smell in their artistic practices, both in their artworks and through their manifestos and poetry. Symbolist artists staged theatrical pieces with scents, while Surrealists diffused coffee, cedar and erotic perfumes in galleries to deliberately confuse the visitors and change their state of mind, while the Futurists used regional aroma?s (lavender, Chianti, volcanic fumes) and smells of war (sulphur and gunpowder) to add a sensory dimension to poetry recitals and heighten the sense of realism. Artists organized scented dinner parties, transforming culinary experience into a multi-sensory performance and they created aromatic toys to train the senses of the child, following the Montessori method. Unfortunately, the scents used by avant-garde artists have mostly been lost, partially due to a lack of interest in the lower senses (smell, taste, touch) both in the academic and the heritage world, but unavoidably also because of their ephemeral nature. In this project scholars, heritage institutions and the fragrance industry will join forces, first to reconstruct the olfactory landscapes and aromatic works of art once created by avant-garde artists and, secondly, to investigate the impact and effectiveness of smell on museum visitors and other audiences.

Worlding Public Cultures: The Arts and Social Innovation is a collaborative research project and transnational platform designed to foster more resilient public cultures and institutions to address the challenges of populist nationalisms and global migrations in pluralist democracies. This project focuses on the global dimensions of contemporary public culture and applies its findings on social innovation in the higher education, museum, and cultural sectors. It proposes worlding (Heidegger 2002 [1950]; Spivak 1985; Hunt 2014; Cheah 2016) or the situated-ness of world-making, as an activating concept and analytical tool. Going beyond current top-down models of “inclusion,” “diversity” and other representations of the “global,” the concept of worlding grounds the global within local worlds and allows entangled histories to emerge, opening pathways to decolonize “universal” Western narratives and epistemologies. Through a series of academies in collaboration with public institutions (National Gallery of Canada; Tate Modern; National Museum of World Cultures, the Netherlands; Tate Modern; Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Berlin) this project is designed to enable transatlantic, multisectoral and public knowledge sharing between those working in and on different geocultural contexts. Worlding Public Cultures will culminate in a website of baseline data, two peer-reviewed volumes and two collaboratively written white papers on pedagogy and curating in a global context. Furthermore, it will play an important role in developing the Transnational and Transcultural Arts and Culture Exchange (TrACE) network. Ultimately, by conducting research on and for institutions of public culture, this project will be an agent of social innovation that impacts how the global is theorized, making concrete recommendations for the education and museum sectors and, ultimately, contributing to the creation of a more resilient society with more elastic models of social cohesion through changes in public discourse.

In recent years shrinkage has again become an issue in Dutch spatial planning, after more than 150 years of population growth. Being accustomed to growth, we tend to forget shrinkage is a recurrent phenomenon in urban history. In the ‘long eighteenth century’ (1670-1830) the urban network in Holland faced an earlier period of economic and demographic decline that became spatially visible in a severe demolition practice and ‘empty towns’. Travelogues describe images of towns that remind us of contemporary Detroit. In this research the governmental management of urban decline and demolition will be approached as a distinct spatial strategy, aimed in particular at preserving the image of the city as a thriving urban community. Hypothesis is that this strategy was in fact common in all shrinking towns in the province of Holland – thus presenting an important, but still largely underresearched aspect of the Dutch urban planning tradition. The project analyses the seven most important shrinking towns in the close-knit urban system of Early Modern Holland: Haarlem, Leiden, Delft, Gouda, Hoorn, Enkhuizen and Alkmaar. A comparative analysis, based on archival research, will allow me to investigate in detail the actions and instruments deployed to manage urban decline. This will not only increase our understanding of ‘planning for decline’ within Dutch urban history, but could also contribute to an international framework on the spatial pattern and management of shrinkage in the past, which can inform both heritage professionals and urban planners and architects facing shrinkage in the future.