The Opening Super — Arthur Cordier

Detail, 187 souvenir magnets, replica’s of the Albert Heijn Museum

The Opening Super, 2019
variable dimensions, metal, plaster, magnets.

How does a supermarket run a museum?

The Opening Super explores how museums and supermarkets feed [off] each other and the cultural implication of Albert Heijn in the shaping of Dutch national identity.

At the Zaanse Schans near Amsterdam, the chain runs their own historical museum, a reconstruction of a 16-17t century Dutch village. The location overlaps with the industrial, colonial and cultural history of the country. The work looks at the relations and the intersections between authenticity, national identity, colonialism and marketing strategies in our dailylife.

While producing a cultural representation of a retail ecosystem, it translates Albert Heijn’s national and historical narratives into a potential ruin. How does a supermarket run a museum - and what does Vermeer have to do with this?

I consider advertising to be an obsolete strategy - yet a strategy that keeps being used. Due to the omnipresence of commercial injunctions in our urban and digital spaces, the resulting saturation ultimately makes advertising invisible - and consequently unecessary. Or is it on the contrary it appearant invisibility that allows it impregnate our lives?

How, and in which forms do products and promotional goods contain their own desuetude? How infused, visible or imperceptible commercial propaganda is in our society is the question that stretches through my practice and this work in particular. This is the ground I stand on, both fascinated and repulsed, disgusted and curious. Is capitalism in the end, a fiction – a narrated illusion?