I. Ike Kamphof, Ruud Hendriks and Tsjalling Swierstra acquired funding from the ZonMW Ethiek en Gezondheid on ‘Make-Believe Matters. The Moral Role Things Play in Dementia Care’

Residential care facilities for people with dementia are currently confronted with an increasing number of new objects and technologies that aim to improve care and to support the well-being of people with dementia. But many of these things contain elements of make-believe that are potentially deceptive. Notable examples are social robots that provide companionship to people with dementia by feigning affection; photo-printed doors made to look like bookshelves, that invisibly manage their behaviour; and VR-devices that offer enriched but unreal experiences.

Person-centred care, now largely the norm in most institutions, demands that care should sustain the personhood of people with dementia. Where people with dementia are particularly susceptible to a loss of trust in their social and material environment, such positive person work includes strict views on potential deception and trickery.

Therefore, this project investigates the ethical question: Under which conditions can practices with artefacts that involve make-believe be seen as supportive of personhood, and when do they count as deceptive and as undermining personhood? Based on fieldwork in care and design practices, it maps emerging moral dilemmas in a fast changing practice. The outcome of the project will be an educational tool for (apprentice) caregivers and designers. This tool will facilitate ethical reflection and decision making that incorporates the role played by artefacts in care, in particular with regard to potential deception.

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II. Emilia Sitzia (with Barbara Garrie and Pieternel Fleskens) organized an international conference ‘Books and the City’.

Cities are complex networks that exist in a constant state of transformation. More than just the built environment of the metropolis, cities are constituted through a range of cultural, geographic, social, political and economic dynamics. The conference, drawing together a range of interdisciplinary perspectives, explored the ways in which these aspects of the city have been articulated by books: their conceptualization, production, distribution and collection. This collaboration between Maastricht University, the Van Eyck Academie and the University of Canterbury (NZ) also brought to the fore local projects such as Gedrukt in Maastricht, and local institutions such as Artist and the Others (who chaired the final session open to the public) and Marres (who chaired the Sensing the city sessions).

There were 16 sessions during three days over two locations: at the Jan van Eyck and at Maastricht University. The topics covered a variety of areas from architectural studies to art history, literature, book conservation, sociology and artistic practices. The conference was structured so each session would have at least one academic, professional and artist and a mixture of subject area while keeping a strong common thread. Sessions such as “Future cities,” “Sensing the city,” or “Urban identity and the book” were particularly successful in bringing together a range of approaches around the theme of the conference.

Odile Heynders, Professor of Comparative Literature at Tilburg University presented a keynote lecture on “City spaces and inhabitants: super-diversity, scenario, imagination.” Odin Essers, main curator of Maastricht University’s heritage collection, presented on Mercator’s Cosmographic Meditations and Braun and Hogenberg’s Cities of the World. Dutch artist Tim Hollander (participant at the JVE) presented an artist talk. The side programme included a “Maastricht panel” exploring the rich history of Maastricht and bookmaking, a University of Maastricht Library Special Collections Tours, and a session open to the general public.

The “Land/Made” exhibition was curated by one of the conference organizers Barbara Garrie (university of Canterbury, NZ) under the auspices of the Hubert van Eyck. A Master’s student from UM, Markéta Jonášová was the curatorial assistant of the exhibition. Related to the conference theme, the assembled artworks concentrated on the material and ideological changes that have shaped Maastricht, and more broadly highlighted the relationship between environment and society and open conversations about our ecological future. Lilo Bauer’s five volume publication Circling provided the starting point for the exhibition. Works by artists Gladys Zeewarders, Cleo Wächter, Kristina Benjocki and Tjalling de Vries were also presented.