International Visitors Programme
At the invitation of the Nieuwe Instituut, Swiss video artist Ursula Biemann visited the After Summer School 2024 in early October. In her field trips to remote places – from the Arctic to the Amazon rainforest – Ursula Biemann often encounters Indigenous communities and their ways of thinking. During her visit, she gave a workshop and a lecture to connect the experiences from her work with the relevant issues for Rotterdam.
On 2 October, together with architect Santiago del Hierro, Ursula Biemann led a workshop called Learning with Forests, Mountains and Rivers, about how knowledge that is often considered ‘alternative’ or ‘peripheral’ is in fact essential to our existence on Earth. During the workshop, participants learned how to take an ecosystem approach, using a method developed in the Andean Amazon to think about hidden non-human relationships through sensing, storytelling and drawing.
On 3 October, during her talk for An Evening With: Ursula Biemann, she guided the audience through her artistic practice, emphasising a systemic approach to environmental conditions, linking a theoretical and planetary macro-level with the micro-politics of the field. The evening focused on these environmental projects and was followed by a discussion with the audience, moderated by the philosopher Rosi Braidotti.
Ursula Biemann is an artist, writer and video essayist. Her artistic practice is research-driven, involving fieldwork in remote locations from Greenland to the Amazon, where she investigates climate change and the ecologies of oil, ice, forests, and water.