////////////////////// Annie Fletcher /////////////////////
//////////////////////// Brief CV ////////////////////////


Annie Fletcher is an independent critic and curator who lives and works in Amsterdam. Be[com]ing Dutch is developed by Charles Esche and Annie Fletcher and others in- and outside the Van Abbemuseum.
The project Be[com]ing Dutch by the Van Abbemuseum has been awarded the Development Award for Cultural Diversity 2006 by the Mondriaan Foundation.

Be[com]ing Dutch in the Age of Global Democracy
Be[com]ing Dutch is a two year project developed both inside and outside the Van Abbemuseum, which consists of debates, reading groups, artist’s projects, exhibitions, residencies, and forms of collective participation and production.
The concept behind Be[com]ing Dutch in the Age of Global Democracy is to move the agenda of multiculturalism on from notions of toleration and difference towards building a shared but agonistic democracy on the cultural level through the use of one of the few remaining public sphere institutions left to us – the museum.
Given the van Abbe Museum’s collection and status as a city museum in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, Be[com]ing Dutch will seek to connect the more abstract discourse to specific local phenomena. This includes the history of Dutch colonisation in Indonesia, Surinam and elsewhere as well as the presence of Turkish, North African and growing Central and Eastern European communities in the area. The project will seek to include people from these communities and to work directly in peripheral areas where they tend to live in more concentrated numbers. Concentrating on the local also permits to look at the indigenous Dutch communities in Eindhoven, and to attempt to involve those groups who are traditionally less involved in the museum as well. The Van Abbemuseum will therefore be forced to research and learn about its own local community for arguably the first time since the days of Jean Leering’s directorship.

(April 2007)