Freek Lomme - Böcker

Key to the work of Lucas Maassen is a process of validation through perception. To what extent are aspects of scale and matter fundamental to determine and pronounce typological objects? In a highly playful manner, Maassen manipulates the parameters of conceiving objects; deriving from recognisable functionality into a fictional realm of attributed economic value as limited or as matter, both effectively qualitative realities, he qualitatively measures these up to apparent conditions of the imaginary. Utilising exclusive materials and technologies, a secondary layer of tension of conceiving objects arises. A toy chair made of pure gold, poured out of one bar of gold, raises the question of its value: emotional vs. real value. Likewise, a chair created by a Focus Electron Beam (FEB), results in a chair so small that even a regular microscope cannot reveal this seat. This chair is a leap of faith into technological authorship. Our day-to-day empirical reality is just not good enough to capture these objects. To what extent is technological culture able to transmit empirical experiences to our mindset? And moreover, our cultural tradition tells us that a chair has four legs but what happens when these notions are being challenged by a non-empirical, technological order? Measuring up chairs to the extent that they seem to generate a life of their own; through a character derived from inner qualities beyond any man-conceived sphere, Maassen creates an imaginative order.The publication of Lucas Maassen features texts by Sonquis Moreno, writer/editor on design in various forms, and Freek Lomme, curator/writer and director of Onomatopee. Moreno lively portrays Maassen’s ’design act’ in its sphere of being, while Lomme playfully levels up the scope of his work to some ontological and empirical parameters. Furthermore, some processes and hypotheses hit the light within this publication!

Drawing attention to the visual quality of concentration, sensation, relations,

We desire to live a life which is both aware and luxurious. The cultural and economic prosperity to which we have been accustomed is getting pressured; raw materials, constitutive to our culture’s economy, are becoming in short supply and thus more expensive. Through this dependence on the financial-economic value of raw materials we have become vulnerable. It is a challenge to disengage from this financial-economic traffic, and in doing so attain more independence – both cultural and economic. Can cultural value give new shape to economic traffic? Can we, in the game of supply and demand, stimulate a new demand through offering a new supply? Elementary Sentiments presents 10 designers who lend to those raw materials, cultural added value. These unique, innovative products stimulate and chart the course of a new, cultural economy – an economy that is independent of financial-economic value. This collaboration between artists’ workshop, Beeldenstorm, and Onomatopee presents 10 talented designers who add cultural extra value by developing the economic durability of raw materials, both personally and sincerely, through experimental production methods: metal + sentiment!With: Alexander Pelikan, Mieke Meijer, Max Lipsey, Daphna Laurens, BCXSY, Rachel Griffin, Julien Carretero and Charlotte Dumoncel d’Argence. Curators/editors: Ellen Zoete, Freek Lomme, Lex van Lith and Max Lipsey Exhibition design: Daphna Laurens Graphic design: Raw ColorTexts: Frederik Baas, Simone de Waard, Ellen Zoete and Freek LommePhotography exhibition: Fieke van BerkomPartner organisation: BeeldenstormSupported by: Municipality of Eindhoven

Motionless, the giraffe in the open country overseeing the panorama . or is it a meerkat, cheeky and sneaky, spying on something that is emerging from the grass. this exhibition brings together recent works by spatial narrator Jeroen Doorenweerd and offers you the opportunity to enter into a travelogue of field arrangements – observing the contemporary adventures that we endure in nature and culture, and fulfilled by those potential experiences. As the coordinates on our compass point us in set directions, we can pick up the binoculars and undergo the purifying effects that the scene can have on our vision.

Against Interpretation, a project that builds upon abstract relations in the public domain is initiated by Whatspace in collaboration with Onomatopee. The information overload races on; in public space it’s more like overkill. Whatspace wants to draw from our relationship to information in public space – to offer us the consecutive possibilities of confrontation, tranquillity and renewed concentration – and they want to do so experimentally, through the power of abstract art. Not only do they want to make this power manifest, they also want to grasp hold of it. Through approaching information exchange experimentally, as an intensely loaded erotics which manifests in and through abstract art, this project becomes fascinating – both for people interested in the powers of abstraction and for those who wish to sharpen their perception of things as they are.

Designing and staging cultural resonance and amplifiers to the surface of reality: this book is inspired by Paul Devens’ “waving platforms” that establish poetic opportunities for the unheard: resonating and amplifying its cultural poetics: a vanguard pronunciation on the social and architectural embedding of sound art. This first in depth publication on the oeuvre of international recognized Dutch sound-artist/architect/designer Devens both stimulates our perceived reality of the audible we’re surrounded by as well as our notion of the underlying social grid. Resultant poetics deeply concern our spatial environments and our opportunities to relate to this holistic sum’s ephemeral presence. The book is truly unique. First of all for the color tones are solely made up by silver and black, capturing the poetic, techy vibrancy of the work. Second and most prominent is the integration of two separately, horizontally placed booklets within the binding cover. The above booklet captures the works while the one below the theory. This allows for flanked reading and browsing through space and tonality.

Paint & Polish sources visual inspiration from the microeconomic culture of Hispanic and African-American nail artists in the Northwest Side of Chicago. It fosters engagement with these artists by highlighting their work and collaborating with them. Included are oral histories, conversations with various nail artists, their portraits by Helen Maurene Cooper, and photography from their business. By documenting the community, this set of materials engages with it profoundly. Inspired by these sources and the visually tempting, distinct style of the nail art, Cooper’s photographic artworks open a gateway to elaborate on the visual identification of nail art. In both photography and the nail art scene, concerns such as gesture, self-expression and labor are prominent. The accompanying writings take these issues into consideration.

We Are The Market! claims a liberal ALL-INCLUSIVITY to push the stretch of our cultural offer in the eye of the final commonplace; the capitalist commons of the high street. Anticipating to a hegemonic culture encroaching on the city centre, one that’s turning exclusive due an engagement towards a “publics” while narrowing the diversity of cultural production for and by the majority; We Are The Market! commissioned 18 unannounced achievements that offered an alternative. As well as this, written contributions were delivered by people able to provide informed content after tending bar in the exhibition space. These offerings to the public were gathered and presented in the relatively private sphere of the Onomatopee white cube—a space all too often mistaken for yet another shop. It was in this public space that an enormous white leather couch sat directly in front of the biggest flatscreen TV on offer; allowing everyone to flick through the documentation of the actions, flanked by the relics of the achievements scattered throughout the ‘white cube’ exhibition space. All of that is now featured in this piece of print, which is meant to distribute lasting inspiration on the span of engagement in the times of rising capitalist commons. Features achievements by Apparatus 22, BURO SNDVG (A Snodero-Group member), David Blamey, Disarming Design, Everyday Criticality, Harmen de Hoop, Ilke Gers, Jasper Griepink, Jennifer Moon & laub, Martin Krenn, MG&M Collective (Mosab Anzo, Gil & Moti), Mona Lisa’s. Nolwenn Salaün, Su Tomesen, Teun Castelein, The Temple of Tease (Izabella Finch), Toine Klaassen and Vanessa Brazeau. The theory-sparked bartenders contributing their thoughts include Berit Fischer, Dirk Vis, Fred Dewey, Koen Haegens, Lietje Bauwens & Wouter De Raeve, Michel van Dartel, Robert-Jan Gruijthuijzen and Rogier Brom. This project was initiated and led by Freek Lomme and would not have been possible without assistant curator Josh Plough and interns Lucy-Rose Nixon (film and production) and Mook Attanath (graphic design and production); all in service and dedication to Onomatopee. Evidently Bart de Baets also helped a great deal, as` he made some astonishing works of graphic design flirting with commerce to serve our ends.