eciec.eu | Entrepreneurial Cultures in European Cities

In June 2009, we got together in Barcelona to discuss strategies for collecting the ‘future heritage’ of contemporary entrepreneurial cultures in European cities. The various museums involved are collecting objects and personal histories of new European entrepreneurs. In the exhibition project Supertoko, Imagine IC in Amsterdam, in collaboration with the University of Amsterdam Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies (IMES), presented the  commodification of diversity and the ways in which the marketing and selling of the new and the exotic is to be understood in relation to the social lifting of neighbourhoods.

New entrepreneurs contribute to a dynamic and inspirational atmosphere, as well as profit from it. Their products and services are often inspired by their countries of origin, but they serve customers far beyond their own communities. Supertoko presents a film by Alex Ivanov of the Fadhil Dahouri. In the neighbourhood of Osdorp, he has opened up, together with his mum Jamila Sabrane, a trendy oriental-style bath: Hammam Shifa. It is in this far Western part of town, associated with large-scale Muslim c.q. Moroccan immigration, as well as with social and public-space disintegration, where local politician Ahmed Marcouch has a vision of ‘a blossoming Muslim community’. For an entry price from ten Euros per person, Hammam Shifa offers wellness. Its Egyptian masseur also offered his services to the guests at the opening of Supertoko in Imagine IC in February 2009. It was at this event that Fadhil explained that his clientele for a considerable part consisted of women and men from, sometimes far, beyond the neighbourhood of Osdorp, looking for a new and different opportunity to relax and have fun.

In Supertoko another entrepreneur, the Ethiopian-born coffee seller Marcos Desta, informs that the neighbourhood around his elegant shop Kaffa, in the East-central Amsterdam Czaar Peterstraat area, has become trendy and chic. His clientele is mostly ‘Dutch’: the yuppies inhabiting the new apartment buildings just around the corner stop by his shop to buy exquisite coffee to serve after dinner. ‘After Russian caviar and Cuban cigars, they now have Ethiopian coffee’, he comments by quoting from a newspaper article in De Volkskrant. A second Supertoko-presented entrepreneur in coffee also profits from this coffee trend. Masho Fantaye has recently set up her small business called Harar Koffie. Harar performs coffee ceremonies at private and public parties and events and serves Ethiopian coffee the traditional way. Harar received a development subsidy from the local government of the Amsterdam Southeast area. Their business development office distributes EU funds; the results of this grant have been exhibited as a side show to Supertoko.

Together with Masho Fantaye and Marcos Desta, Imagine IC has experimented with the attraction of Ethiopian coffee in its own neighbourhood, the Amsterdam Bijlmer area. This outskirt to the far Southeast of Amsterdam was constructed from the 1960s to offer spacious flats to the middle classes. By now the area houses over 150 ethnicities and has in the past decade gone through large architectural and social reconstructions. Imagine IC is located in the heart of the commercial centre. Every day hundreds of bankers and other office staff pass by to get their lunches-to-go. They mix but hardly ever more fundamentally meet with the inhabitants of the area, who come to shop or hang out. Under the title of ‘Take Away Culture’, and during four lunch hours and afternoons in June 2009, we offered to all of them Ethiopian coffee along with a chat on entrepreneurship and diversity. Some 250 cups of coffee were shared. Many passers-by were intrigued; some actively interested. But others wanted to have nothing to do with this and preferred to spend their lunch hour as they had planned and in peace.

July 2009, Marlous Willemsen, Imagine IC