Huawei comes to Assen
Two months after DKAI Lab flew to Shenzhen as Huawei's guest, a small Huawei party came the other way, to Assen. One afternoon, six photographs, no programme.
The outbound leg ran from 29 June to 4 July 2025 and covered Shenzhen, Dongguan, Hong Kong and Shanghai. This is the reply. On 4 September 2025 a handful of visitors came to DKAI Lab's own city instead. The whole record is six frames from one phone, spanning forty-six minutes, from 13:25 to just after 14:11. That makes it a working visit rather than an event, and the chapter is sized accordingly.
Place comes from the files, not from the folder name. Three frames carry GPS at 52°59'38"N, 6°33'45"E. A fourth sits about 250 metres away at 52°59'36"N, 6°33'32"E. Both points fall inside Assen, in Drenthe. The first is a corner table against a wall of tall windows, with brick gables and street trees behind the glass. The second is a period shop interior with deep pink joinery, old Droste cacao tins ranged along the shelves, and a wooden sign reading SCHIERBEEK above them. An estate agent's board in the window carries the name Makelaardij Schierbeek and the number 0592 33 16, and 0592 is the Assen dialling code. Two independent artifacts, one city.
The camera stayed away from whatever was actually discussed. No slides, no whiteboard, no badges, no lanyards appear in any frame. Four people sit at the table, four faces to the lens, a tablet face down beside one of them. In the last picture five people stand together in the shop interior, the group of four plus one more. Tarry Singh is in every frame, holding the phone for two of them. None of the other faces carries a name anywhere in the files, so none is given here.
None of the six photographs shows the inside of the lab office itself. The folder title makes that claim, the pixels do not. What the pixels prove is the date, the city and the fact that a Huawei delegation and DKAI Lab spent an afternoon in Assen together. Nothing in the archive records what was agreed.
