Research
Research Projects
Het Nieuwe Instituut develops the following research projects based on the programme tracks Landscape & Interior, Materials & Things and annual themes.
Image by The Anderen for Het Nieuwe Instituut
Financial Architectures
Financial Architectures is a research project to document and reflect on the intricate financial formulas, incentives, and protagonists behind the designs of present-day buildings, cities, and landscapes. Financialization has introduced financial and legal complexities into the capillaries of society, obscuring what and where design interventions have exponential outcomes.
Collecting Otherwise
Drawing on the architecture collection under the Nieuwe Instituut’s management, Collecting Otherwise explores the possibilities for an alternative architectural, heritage and archival practice, one that reflects a society that is constantly changing. Following the previous editions Seen/Unseen (2021) and Post/De/Colonial (2022), 2023 is dedicated to The Tool Shed – the resources that can help to develop new ways of acquiring, classifying and exhibiting heritage.
Lithium
Conceived as a spa resort, the exhibition Lithium highlights the beneficial and destructive aspects of the eternal human search for energy. Researchers, designers and artists reflect on the role of the chemical element lithium in powering today’s economy. How many times can we recharge our batteries without addressing the causes of depletion, in both human bodies and the planet?
Monument
Monument is a collaboration with e-flux Architecture to investigate how monuments have - once again - come to play a pivotal role in mobilising and rearticulating struggles for recognition. The series features essays by Arna Mačkić, Wayne Modest, Philipp Oswalt, Jorge Otero-Pailos, Robert Jan van Pelt, Valentina Rozas-Krause, and Mabel O. Wilson, with videos by Vasyl Cherepanyn, Manuel Correa, Quinsy Gario, Dima Srouji, The Black Archives, Milica Tomić, and Sumayya Vally.
Zoöp
The Zoöp project is a practice-based research into the design and application of a new kind of legal format for collaboration between humans and collective bodies of nonhumans, in order to support ecological regeneration.
Vertical Atlas
Vertical Atlas is a new atlas to help us navigate the digital geopolitics of the world today. Vertical Atlas is a book, a digital publication and an exhibition. Join us for the festive launch of Vertical Atlas on Thursday October 27th, 8pm at Het Nieuwe Instituut. With lectures by Nanjala Nyabola, Benjamin H. Bratton and a performance by Francois Knoetze.
Terraforming Earth
Terraforming Earth is a series of lectures and design labs about twenty-first-century society. The premise is that political and economic systems should be conceived and designed in a radically different way in order to create an environment for a society of plants, animals, people and machines to sustain itself and to thrive.
Photo: Alexander Taylor
Automated Landscapes
Based on the premise that automation disrupts not only labour markets but also the configuration and design of entire territories, 'Automated Landscapes' seeks to document and reflect upon the emerging--and anonymous--architectures and landscapes of fully-automated, non-human work. The project follows an ongoing commitment of Het Nieuwe Instituut to address the implications of automation and artificial intelligence for architecture, design and digital culture.
Architecture and Representation
In fall 2017, Het Nieuwe Instituut launched a collaboration with e-flux Architecture and The Berlage that investigates the power of representation within and beyond the field of architecture.
ADM. Photo: Johannes Schwartz
Architecture of Appropriation
The squatting movement has played a major role in the design of the urban fabric and the domestic interior. Using spatial improvisation and radical, subversive tactics, rather than master plans or conventional design strategies, squatters have proposed alternatives to the dominant, market oriented housing policies, arguing that the people's right to a house supersedes the right of property ownership.
And Other Spectres
And Other Spectres is a series of essays, exhibitions, public events that investigate agents that, being generally imperceptible or barely visible to the human eye, are able to permeate the sphere of the body (whether it is human, machinic or that of the nation-state) and its prosthesis in the form of computers, domestic and private spaces, triggering a multitude of cultural stories and fears.
Matter
Matter is a series that explores the shifting relationship between design practice and matter. It brings together designers and other practitioners to imagine non-exploitative and non-human centric forms of engagements with materiality, and inquires what it means to design with social and ecological sensitivity in the age of escalating environmental crisis.
Memory and Oblivion
Memory and Oblivion is a long-term research project on ideology, memory and monuments. The project will look at different case studies around the world that epitomize the fight against the specter of fascism, and the demand of a renewed relation between remembering and forgetting.
Geographies of Freedom
The collaborative research project Geographies of Freedom, initiated and developed by Egbert Alejandro Martina and Miguel Peres dos Santos, investigates the ways in which geography, architecture and the law produce, maintain, and spatialise freedom.
Burn-Out
In 2018 Het Nieuwe Instituut embarks on a new programme around the theme of burn-out. The initiative addresses the exhaustion of a growing number of human and other bodies, as a symptom of the presence of exploitative structures within society throughout institutional, political and biological ecologies.
For the Record
For the Record investigates how contemporary video culture operates as a public space for consumerism, activism and emancipation, by exposing existing realities and by imagining alternatives.
Object created by Shiv Integer, a bot on the Thingiverse website for 3D-models. Makers: Matthew Plummer-Fernandez and Julien Deswaef
Algorithmic Culture
Algorithmic Culture is a research programme at Het Nieuwe Instituut that critically investigates the nature and effects of the entanglement of culture with algorithmic processes.
Critical Making
Het Nieuwe Instituut is one of the consortium partners in Bridging Art, Design and Technology through Critical Making, a research project that focuses on the application of the concept of Critical Making beyond the realm of 'maker culture'.