More-than-Human
In April 2022, Het Nieuwe Instituut is celebrating spring with an inclusive, diverse and more-than-human programme. The institute becomes a nature-friendly zoöp, reopens The New Garden, and launches the exhibition In Search of the Pluriverse_._ Designers and architects investigate how different life forms, communities and landscapes can best energise each other, exploring wide-ranging ways they can shape equal worlds together.
Spring in Het Nieuwe Instituut
Het Nieuwe Instituut invited writer Dirk van Weelden to outline the reasons, background and context for our spring 2022 programme. In this piece, he explains how the programme's three very different projects - The New Garden, the Zoöp and the Pluriverse exhibition - respond to the climate crisis by rethinking the role not only of design and designers, but of humanity itself.
Read Spring in Het Nieuwe Instituut: "But on what do you base the search for an alternative to the short-sighted, immense over-exploitation caused by the Western industrial model? This spring, the institute is presenting three projects about the sources, ideas and practical explorations that are useful responses in the light of this question: The New Garden, the Zoöp project and the exhibition In Search of the Pluriverse."
The New Garden
Come outside, experience the richness of the garden and discover your new favourite picnic spot (with take-away drinks and snacks from Het Nieuwe Café)! Keep an eye on our website this summer for stories in which we take a closer look at the people, animals, plants, soil, water and even radiation in The New Garden.
As part of the spring programme More-than-Human, The New Garden is reopening on 22 April 2022 after a winter of extensive work. The ecological urban garden outside Het Nieuwe Instituut was laid out in 2015 by artist and designer Frank Bruggeman and landscape gardener Hans Engelbrecht. Their design is based on the species that naturally grow in this place and deliberately leaves room for naturalisation. With their restrained green management, they stimulate a big-city ecosystem in which the non-human residents and human users of the garden give themselves and each other space.
Read more about The New Garden here.
The Zoöp
On 22 April 22, Het Nieuwe Instituut will officially become a zoöp, the first zoöp in the world! The zoöp is a 'cooperative of life', an organisation in which people commit themselves to learning to cooperate on equal terms with non-human life.
The dichotomy between nature and culture has become almost fatal for humans, animals, plants and planet. In order to try to rectify this mistake, institute staff members will now explicitly work as people in and with the ecosystem of which they are part. In a number of projects, designers, artists and theorists make tangible how a more-than-human community can develop. They are not held back by limited human knowledge or perception as they experiment, for example, with an economy based on recovery rather than on exhaustion.
Read in an interview with initiator Klaas Kuitenbrouwer what a zoöp actually is and why Het Nieuwe Instituut will become the first zoöp operation in the world: "A zoöp is a working system that continuously searches for ways to allow an organisation to contribute as concretely and practically as possible to the regeneration of ecological quality. You want to learn to respond to the powers and laws of nature."
Check the web magazine for all backgrounds, details, models and activities.
In Search of the Pluriverse
In April, Het Nieuwe Instituut will host a major exhibition entitled In Search of the Pluriverse. In it, curators Sophie Krier and Erik Wong select, combine and present the work of more than 30 designers, artists, activists and researchers from all over the world.
Van Weelden writes of In Search of the Pluriverse: "The exhibition presents different aspects of the search for what design can be in four sections, based on the realisation that what the world needs is a practical perspective on building, designing and organising, one which aims to promote the balanced coexistence of all life forms. This goes beyond ecological regeneration. It also embraces social and political consequences. Much inspiration comes from Indigenous traditions and the cultures of colonised communities...
What is remarkable about the tenor of the exhibition is that there is so much emphasis on sensory, experimental research, in combination with a cultural and historical context. The designing and consuming individual has been dethroned. It's all about operating in an equal collective, and embedding the design process in local communities, the landscape and the ecology."
Read more about In Search of the Pluriverse here.