Plumbing the System — La Biennale di Venezia 2023Plumbing the System — La Biennale di Venezia 2023

Architect Jan Jongert graduated from the Rotterdam Academy of Architecture in 2003. He is a co-founder of the architecture office Superuse Studios. As a designer of interiors and buildings, Jongert works on tactics to enable the transition to a responsible society. With Superuse, he develops tools and processes and realises concrete projects that stimulate local exchange and production, as an alternative to transporting raw materials, products and parts all over the world, whereby much is lost unnecessarily. Jongert is mainly concerned with ‘flows’, both in interiors and in urban areas and in industry. He studies how they progress and builds new cross-connections and shortcuts that provide ecosystems with alternative new value. Currently a senior researcher at Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences, Jongert also teaches system design for various architecture and design master’s degree courses worldwide.

Carlijn Kingma is a cartographer, but clearly not in the traditional sense. She is society’s mapmaker, a cultural cartographer. Her astonishing drawings map the intricacies of our complex social systems. Kingma develops an architecture that reveals the social and political power structures we normally cannot see, and allows us to visualise new, alternative futures.

For The Waterworks of Money, she collaborated with Thomas Bollen and Martijn Jeroen van der Linden. Thomas Bollen is a financial economist and a journalist with the Dutch investigative platform Follow the Money. Martijn Jeroen van der Linden is a professor of new finance at The Hague University of Applied Sciences. For his PhD thesis, he developed design guidelines for the money system in the digital age. The Waterworks of Money is the culmination of two and half years of close collaboration and joint research, which entailed hundreds of interviews and conversations with experts.

Kingma's spatial installations are designed and developed by architect Sarah van der Giesen, who studied at Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam and Universität Der Künste in Berlin before graduating at the Delft University of Technology.

Designer and educator Roosje Klap studied graphic design at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. With her studio ARK (Atelier Roosje Klap) she explores the experimental boundaries of ‘custom-fit design’ through intensive collaborations with other artists, curators, architects, designers and writers. ARK’s research-based interdisciplinary approach epitomises a generation of designers who combine their own work and autonomous practice with commissioned work. As an educator and coach specialising in graphic design, media arts and digital humanities, Roosje Klap has developed and led curricula and workshops for international art academies and universities around the world, aimed at guiding and inspiring creators and fostering fair relationships in their environments. In 2022, ARK won the Golden Calf for Best Digital Cultural Production at the Netherlands Film Festival.

Yannick Verweij is a multi-disciplinary artist working as a scenographer and theatre maker. He studied scenography at HKU University of the Arts Utrecht, The Netherlands and Drama at KASK School of Arts Ghent, Belgium. Verweij has worked in various fields in the (performaning) arts including theatre, dance, opera, puppetry theatre and installation art. His practices include designing sets, costumes, lighting, and video, as well as directing and writing. He has worked for renowned companies such as the Dutch National Opera, Theater Oostpool, Bochum Symphony Orchestra, and Grand Théâtre de Genève, and is teacher at HKU University of the Arts Utrecht since 2018. Verweij attempts to create spaces in people's imagination through scenography, linking to concrete issues in our everyday society. These spaces are a safe space for the audience to be confronted, to reflect, and to contemplate.