ResearchResearch

dr. Ramon Amaro is Senior Researcher in Digital Culture at Nieuwe Instituut, the national institute for architecture, design and digital culture in The Netherlands. An engineer and sociologist by training, Ramon's writings, research and artistic practice emerge at the intersections of Black Study, digital culture, psychosocial study, and the critique of computational reason. Before joining the Nieuwe Instituut, Ramon worked as Lecturer in Art and Visual Cultures of the Global South at UCL (London), Engineering Program Manager for the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and Quality Design Engineer for General Motors. His recently published book, The Black Technical Object: On Machine Learning and the Aspiration of Black Being (Sternberg, 2023) contemplates the abstruse nature of programming and mathematics, and the deep incursion of racial hierarchy, to inspire alternative approaches to contemporary algorithmic practice.

Delany Boutkan is a writer, editor and curator and works as a researcher as part of the Nieuwe Instituut’s Research team. Here she has been coordinating the annual International Call for Fellows and several other collaborative research projects and public programs since 2019, such as Collecting Otherwise. Her current research interests engage with language as a (design) material in the practical, theoretical, and pedagogical realms of the design and architecture fields. Her latest programme Design Drafts is a growing writing and publishing network dedicated to investigating and drafting what it means to write about design today. Her work has been featured in publications by Metropolis M, MacGuffin magazine, Z33, Onomatopee Projects, PS Sandberg / Sandberg Instituut, Disegno Journal and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam’s Kunstlicht Journal. Between 2020 and 2022, Delany curated the lectures and debates programme ‘5th Floor Talks’ at Design Academy Eindhoven with the Masters in Social Design and Contextual Design. She received her Master degree in Design Curating & Writing at the Design Academy Eindhoven.

Marten Kuijpers is a senior researcher at the Nieuwe Instituut, where he has led the research project Automated Landscapes and co-edited its accompanying publication. He has worked on various exhibitions, such as Sicco Mansholt: A Good European, MVRDVHNI: The Living Archive of a Studio, and _Garden Futures: Designing with Nature_. Currently, he is coordinating a three-year program to develop an archive for garden and landscape design in the Netherlands. Marten holds a Master's degree in architecture from the University of Technology in Eindhoven.

After graduating from the Royal Academy of Art in 2019, Wietske Nutma has been working as a multidisciplinary designer and researcher. In her practice she works across the fields of design, ecology and participation in an effort to find ways to contribute to the living world. Wietske has been working at the Nieuwe Instituut since February 2021 where she joined the Zoöp project to explore what it means to - and how we can - live together in multispecies communities.

Federica Notari is a multimedia trans-disciplinary researcher. She graduated from Leiden University with an MA in African Studies (cum laude) and MA in Media Studies – where she graduated with a visual and written thesis. Her research practice questions how we navigate space, how it informs us, and how we belong to space. Through her methodologies, she aims to demystify the role of the researcher and question epistemologies of knowledge. She particularly focuses on how identities shape spaces and are shaped by spaces, as well as how material, cultural artifacts embody meaning beyond their materiality – focusing largely on gestures of memory held in the ephemeral. Federica currently works at the Nieuwe Insituut since 2021, at Leiden University coordinating the Digital Skills Hub as well being a thesis supervisor at Gerrit Rietveld Academie for the BA DesignLab. Her latest research interest is Remix Culture, thinking through ways in which DJ methodologies and nightlife reflect ways in which we world-make. Outside these realms she is also the co-founder and organizer of night-life event, Discoteca Amore, and curator of Words Off the Page, an event that rethinks the space where writing ‘belongs’.

Setareh Noorani is an architect, researcher and curator at the Nieuwe Instituut, and is part of various experimental collectives. She uses various media in her projects and artistic contributions to explore ways of publicising and embodying, questioning processes of trauma and time; always moving in the grey space between academic research and art. This is expressed in the research, disruption, dislocation, and uncovering of archives through spatial research and (self-)publishing, for example in her residencies at Voorheen De Gemeente (2022 – ), Biënnale Gelderland (2022), DSGN-IN at The Black Archives (2021-2022), SHELTER IN PLACE/SHELTER IN SOLIDARITY (2021) at Hotel Maria Kapel, Hoorn (together with graphic designer Matt Plezier, as SMET, supported by the Creative Industries Fund Netherlands), and spatial and architectural designs, for Metro54, Amsterdam Museum, Buro Stedelijk, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Dutch Design Embassies, among others. Her current (curatorial) research at the Nieuwe Instituut focuses on the qualitative, paradigm-shifting notions of decoloniality, feminisms, queer ecologies, non-institutional representations, and the implications of the collective, more-than-human body in architecture, its heritage and ambiguous future scenarios – for instance as part of the projects Collecting Otherwise, Appropriation as Collective Resistance, Feminist Design Strategies, and Modernisms Along the Indian Ocean. Setareh Noorani received for this work the Museum Talent Prize 2021, awarded by the Dutch Ministry of Culture and Science and, most recently, the Mondriaan Fund. She currently is in the curatorial team of the London Design Biënnale 2023, and involved in the selection committees of the yearly the Nieuwe Instituut Call for Fellows and Tilting Axis Fellowship. Setareh holds a master’s degree (MSc) in Architecture (TU Delft, cum laude).

Kirtis Clarke (b.1996, South London) is an interdisciplinary artist, designer and cultural practitioner living and working between Amsterdam and London. As a steering member of the Co-Creating Change network, he is invested in developing co-created practice through the commissioning of new or existing methodologies. At the Nieuwe Instituut he works as a freelance researcher and designer assisting in the implementation of co-created methods at various scales. Threads of Commonality Is an ongoing research and series of public events that aims to share knowledge from across the field through various interlocking threads central to co-creation. He has guest lectured at the Graphic Design BA at The University of the West of England and In 2022 he joined The Sandberg Instituut as a tutor for the Dirty Art Department MA. As a practicing artist, Kirtis works across performance, sculpture, digital media and archiving, where encounters with other artists, friends, family and members of the black diaspora aid in developing new methodologies for creating work rooted in a collective sense of identity. His work has been presented at The Black Cultural Archives (London), Dutch Design Week (Eindhoven), HOME by Ronan Mckenzie (London) and ICF Diaspora Pavilion 2 (London).

Klaas Kuitenbrouwer studied history and mostly worked in digital culture. He is senior researcher at the Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam and teaches theory at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. Since the late 1990s, he has worked at the intersections of art, design, technology and ecology. He researches, curates and lectures in themes at the touch points of these fields. In the early 2000’s he set up and curated the Mediamatic research workshops on the cultural significance of new digital technologies. He co-curated the Transnatural festivals (2010 – 2013) and worked in the field of cultural policy of digital culture at Virtueel Platform (2009 – 2013).

A consistent element in his work is the intersection of different knowledge practices: technological, artistic, legal, organisational, scientific, and more-than-human. In recent years, he researched curated, among other programs, Garden of Machines (2015), Gardening Mars (2017), Bot Club and the Neuhaus Temporary Academy for more-than-human knowledge (2019) which led to the initiation of the Zoöp project - the development and implementation of an organisation model for collaboration between human and other-than-human life.