Advising researcher Design / Quaero
Vinca Kruk (1980) is a graphic designer and writer living and working in Amsterdam.
In her practice, Vinca seeks relationships between design and theory by merging the two in research-based projects. This approach first came to the fore in her thesis The formulation of Superadjacency (2003) and later resulted in the collaboration Meta Haven: Design Research, which was founded in 2005 with Daniël van der Velden, Adriaan Mellegers and Tina Clausmeyer.
Meta Haven first started to collaborate at the Jan van Eyck Academie in 2003, with visual research into the Principality of Sealand, a tiny nation-state located on a former war platform in the North Sea. This project was centred around the pro-active engagement with a non-commissioning subject of interest, coming to terms with myth and symbolism, territorial identity and its diffusion into information networks.
Since, Meta Haven has been investigating an array of case studies in which the linkage between imagination and politics is of central importance.
In 2004, Vinca initiated the History vs. Future project, which focused on the relationship between identity and history; this resulted in a research on the House of People in Bucharest, Romania. The results of this discursive approach include, apart from a series of visual models and scenarios, the conferences The Museum of Conflict and Regimes of Representation, which Meta Haven organized around the relations between art, politics and the symbolic aspect of totalitarian architecture.
In 2007, Meta Haven will carry out research into the French/German Internet search engine project Quaero,
in collaboration with researchers Tsila Hassine and Gon Zifroni. This research attempts to merge a critical and imaginative understanding of design with a discussion on Internet, politics, public domain and cultural heritage.
Vinca Kruk has been a guest lecturer at the Willem de Kooning Academie in Rotterdam and has collaborated
with Adriaan Mellegers on various design commissions.
Meanwhile, the Meta Haven: Design Research team is working on a book, Uncorporate identity, scheduled for publication in the autumn of 2007.