Concept and production Trouvé

Everyone calls themselves a curator these days. Curating playlists, curating outfits, curating dinner parties. The term has been emptied out—what used to mean selecting and contextualizing work with specific expertise now just means "I chose things I like."

But actual curatorial practice involves creating frameworks within which different works can encounter each other and generate new meaning. You establish relationships between autonomous practices. You build a context that allows individual voices to remain distinct while contributing to a larger conversation.

With the Trouvé lamp, I wanted to test whether an object could function as curatorial framework.
The lamp itself—Marten van Middelkoop's design, technically developed for Dutch production—became the thematic center. Not a theme like "sustainability" or "the future" that artists respond to with work. But a physical object that multiple makers could relate their practice to, each from their own autonomous position.

The artists I invited wanted more context. They needed something to hold onto. I told them about the Dutch production process, the technical challenges, what I was trying to build with COHORS. But I also gave them freedom: respond to what you see, from your own practice.

Look at what emerged. Composer Eric Magnée borrowed the aluminum base to build his soundscape—the lamp's materiality became his instrument. Animator Joost Kraan saw a scrapyard, a dystopian world where the Trouvé rises from piles of metal debris and classical ruins. Photographer Milan Boonstra took the lamps to an experimental brothel the municipality had set up to address human trafficking (a beautiful, memorable failure of policy)—situating luxury design in contested social space. Painter/graphic designer Eveline Schram placed the lamp in her characteristic world of clean lines, bright colors, feminine references, sunny landscapes.

Four responses, four completely different worlds. AR designer Freek Rutkens, art director Rianne Petter, webdesigners Ruben Daas and team Studio Alloy each found their own angle.

This is what traditional thematic curating often fails at. Think about typical group exhibitions: "The Future of Work" or "Sustainable Practices." Curators select artists whose existing work fits the theme, then write wall texts explaining the concept. The concept comes first, the work gets slotted in.
With the Trouvé, the process inverted. The concrete object grounded each response without prescribing what that response should be. A composer hears the lamp as sound. An animator sees it emerging from ruins. A photographer uses it to navigate social politics. A painter integrates it into her visual universe. Same lamp, radically different practices.

When you bought the Trouvé, you bought that entire constellation. The lamp functioned as both product and curatorial structure—infrastructure for multiple artistic practices to coexist, relate, generate meaning together while each maintaining their integrity.

And it challenges that inflated notion of curating. You're not just selecting nice things or imposing concepts. You're building a structure where autonomous practices can respond to something concrete, from their own expertise, creating coherence without conformity.

The Trouvé was one lamp. It was also an exhibition, a curatorial experiment, and a question: can an object function as infrastructure for multiple artistic practices?

Turns out it can. It's a marketing nightmare, but that's another story...