One of them is Tintin Wulia, who collects passports from different nationalities. She has now got 129, sorted by color and exhibited. “My goal is to collect passports from all countries in the world,” she says. “I have been fascinated by passports for a very long time. You can get into so many problems if you don’t have the right passport. At the same time, the notion of nationality is so arbitrary.

As a child I only wanted to be a cosmopolitan, not a citizen of any specific country. Now that I have become an adult, I know that this is impossible, but this collection is possible. I currently live about 4,400 kilometers away from the place where I was born and yet I have a passport from that place of birth. If I had been born in Denpasar on Bali one hundred years ago, people would not have called me an Indonesian, but a Dutch East Indian of Chinese extraction. And if I had been born there in 1940, my birth certificate would have been drawn up in the Japanese year 2062.”

Vulnerable
Together with the passports Tintin also collects stories about passports or of people having trouble in connection with their passports. The passport collection features names of people from all over the globe. However, Tintin has put each name in a random passport, to indicate how arbitrary the concept of nationality is. Tintin: “We do not get to choose where we are born. The system of nationalities makes us quite vulnerable. Just think of what happened in Kosovo this year. And earlier this year I added the Montenegro passport to my collection.”

By way of an extra you can see flattened gnats, including the accompanying blood spatters, in the passports. “When you kill a gnat, you see your own blood,” explains Tintin. “Gnats have inhabited this earth much longer than we. And most probably they will outlive us as well.”

Asking
The exhibition also has works of art and installations specially made for Be(com)ing Dutch, such as an art parade that crisscrossed through Eindhoven on 24 May. It followed the same route as the carnival parade. The parade Question Paintings (Asking is not Answering) was meant as a protest march. The protest signs were written over the past year by visitors to the Van Abbemuseum and by a number of artists. Surasi Kusolwong, who lives and works in Bangkok, makes his interactive works of art in order to make problems in connection with understanding different cultures, social systems and individuals tangible.

Congratulations
The Italian artist Mario Rizzi has interviewed different people for a year, especially in Eindhoven. He has made six films of this with different themes. Mario Rizzi: “People comment on what it means to be Dutch. Another theme is ‘a moment of passing’.” Such a moment is not only the one of being granted the Dutch nationality, but also of gaining a PhD, for instance. For this reason we see the defense ceremony of a Russian researcher at the TU/e.

In many cases the interviews and images are comical and embarrassing, but also emotional – for example of a woman who says how happy she was to be given some photos from her childhood. This enabled her to show other people that she also had a life before her arrival in the Netherlands. The films are shown in a kind of holiday homes, which look like the shelters in which refugees who have asked for asylum in the Netherlands are accommodated. The name of the project is ‘Congratulations’, because that is the first word heard by a new Dutch citizen, when he or she receives the citizenship.

Being at home
‘Shelter’ is the title of the work by Toos Nijssen. “I have moved so many times already in my life. I have lived somewhere else almost every year, so I don’t really know the meaning of the notion ‘at home’.” Therefore she lets people all over the world explain what that means for them. The interviews are shown in a hut made of blankets, a primitive place to feel at home. On the blankets there are texts that refer to the experience of being ‘at home’ somewhere.

Photo lab
Apart from the exhibition in the Van Abbe there are various projects outside the museum, such as City Foto at Stratumsedijk 3. Here you may have your negatives developed for free. The photos are used by the artist Phil Collins to show hidden images of Eindhoven, its inhabitants and their personal lives. And on 14 September the artists Jos van der Pol and Liesbeth Bik will gather as many people as possible so as to try and make the Evoluon float by means of the imagination. ‘Close Encounters’ is the name of this closing project of Be(com)ing Dutch./.

Be(com)ing Dutch Exhibition until 14 September 2008 in Van AbbeMuseum, Bilderdijklaan 10, Eindhoven, opening hours Tuesday - Sunday 11.00 - 17.00 hours. Thursday 11.00 - 21.00 hours. Admission students 4 euros. Thursday night 17.00 - 21.00 hours admission free.