MYTHKEEPING
The practice of selecting objects to shape a country’s history and identity is strictly kept by national museums. Disrupting this institutional role involved independently finding a new historically significant object, acquiring, documenting, and exhibiting it.
ASML is an extremely secretive and crucial technology company for the Netherlands’ national security. Objects documenting its chip-making processes could be used to represent and materialize new national myths. Acquiring an empty case traceable to the company revealed a shaped foam lining, leaking the shape of an object still protected by trade secret. In a performative act of mythmaking, the case and a reconstruction of the object are brought into the Rijksmuseum, the Dutch National Museum in Amsterdam.
