News

The Horizon 2020 project WaterLANDS (Water-based Solutions for Carbon Storage, People, and Wilderness) has selected six artists to complete a 4-year part-time placement as part of the WaterLANDS Artistic Engagement Residency. EU Horizon has funded the selection of six artists to each reflect on one of six different ecological restoration sites in Europe as part of the large-scale and ambitious project ‘WaterLANDS‘.

Marjolijn Dijkman develops ‘Turbid Tides’ in relation to one of these six sites, reflecting on ecological restoration and depoldering in the context of the Ems-Dollard estuary and the surrounding landscape in the North of the Netherlands.

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The group exhibition ‘Tending Loss: Mourning beyond the Human’ explores the emotional and existential dimensions of ecological disruption. The concept of ‘solastalgia,’ which refers to the grief and alienation that arise when one’s own living environment is irreparably altered, forms the starting point for an investigation into grief, loss, and melancholy in the era of climate change.

Artists, thinkers, and researchers visualise diverse forms of ecological loss: the disappearance of species, landscapes, ecosystems, and the sense of home. Through installations, sound, film, and performative practices, a space is created in which these often unspoken emotions can be acknowledged and shared. Simultaneously, the exhibition explores new rituals, languages, and collective imaginaries to deal with this loss, not only human, but also multispecies. ‘Tending Loss’ shows that grief need not simply mean paralysis, but can develop into a source of care, solidarity and resistance, and into a renewed connection with an Earth that changes but never ceases to speak.

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Another Perception: Forms of Time, Whisper of the Other, Digital Traces invites audiences to temporarily set aside human scales of perception and sense how stones remember, how fungi communicate, and how algorithms dream. The exhibition focuses on how we perceive life, matter, and processes that are non-human or beyond human scale.

With: Chen Xiaoyi; Semiconductor; Judith Roder; Marjolijn Dijkman; Wang&Soderstrom; Fei Yining; Emilija Skarnulyte; Long Pan; Marc Lee; Jacob Kudsk Steensen; Qiu Yu; Dillon Marsh

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Trigger #7 — Ocean brings together artists, photographers, marine scientists, researchers and writers to explore the ocean not simply as a subject to be photographed, but as an environment, a force and a way of thinking about images.

Contributors: Mae Lubetkin, Carolin Brendel, Dhia Dhibi, Matthew James Beach and Travis Brandwood, SHOOK Studio, Yvette Monahan, Simone Kessler in collaboration with Cristina Zenato, Marjolijn Dijkman, Sonia Levy, Bianca Baldi in conversation with Miranda Lowe, Hyeongjin Oh, Alice Sharp, Rossella Biscotti, Toby Yuen-Gen Liang and Dionysios Raitsos, Aliki Christoforou, Tao Leigh Goffe, Rosa Lacavalla, Ayasha Guerin, Anna Ridler, Cecilia Sordi Campos, Noor van der Wal, Lucia Rebolino, Anastasía Miseyko, Chiara Indelicato, Bruna Casas and Anna Montraveta Riu, and Fiepke van Niel and Nienke Coers, among others.

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New Landscape is a curatorial research project investigating the contemporary landscape as an unstable, living organism shaped by ecological, climatic and human processes. Alongside new interdisciplinary art installations, the festival includes a curated screening programme drawing on archival footage that engages with landscape, water and ecological transformation.

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Bioart Society’s eighth feral lab, Field_Notes: Living Methodologies, took place at Kilpisjärvi Biological Station in Gilbbesjávri, Sápmi, in September 2025, exploring through collective interdisciplinary research how our methods matter.

A year on, we are launching two reflective texts commissioned from contributors: Fielding Climate Change: A Cranky Score For (One’s Politics Of) Curiosity by Anastasia (A) Alevtin & Elina Waage Mikalsen, and Living Methodologies – what enters the field with us? by Marjolijn Dijkman & Sam Nightingale.

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Conductive Solidarity #2 is an evening event where we will explore the energetic world of cable bacteria. Cable bacteria are microscopic conductors that have transported electrons through sediment for hundreds of millions of years, making the sediment’s composition habitable for other organisms. Their recent discovery has challenged many scientific assumptions.

Under the light of the full moon and the many light sources of Eemshaven, we’ll venture into the charged landscape of the Eems-Dollard together with artist Marjolijn Dijkman, natural scientist Lealia Derickx, and “Wikster van het Wad” Pia van Dellen. Throughout the evening, we’ll explore how cable bacteria challenge the boundary between ecology and technology, and how that may inspire us to view the landscape around the Eems-Dollard with fresh eyes.

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Metabolising Time brings together artistic practices that resist this dominant model. Rather than reproducing the prevailing image of ‘time’ as a singular, forward-moving destiny, the installations brought together at MU focus on multiple ways of structuring duration: cyclical, repetitive, embodied, ancestral, geological and more-than-human. What emerges, then, is not a single time but many overlapping, conflicting and unequally distributed forms of time.

Participating artists: Firas Shehadeh, Joey Holder, K Allado-McDowell, Karlos Gil, Kristina Õllek & Kert Viiart-Õllek, Lara Tabet, Levi van Gelder, Lucas Lugarinho, Marina Otero Verzier, Marjolijn Dijkman, Max Hooper Schneider

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Talks by K Allado McDowell & Marjolijn Dijkman in the framework of the exhibition Metabolising Time – Rhythms Beyond Linearity. In their own distinct ways, both artists explore different experiences of time and the metabolising of the biosphere, intelligence, and extinction, challenging us to imagine alternative visions of life.

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Under the banner of Gemene Wegen (Common Ways), art and poetry descend on Watou and its surroundings in the summer of 2026. This edition works with collectives for the first time, placing collaboration at its heart. The result is a wealth of new creations. More than fifty artists and poets come together to shape and colour Watou 2026.

The festival asks what we have in common and how we live together in polarised times. It is precisely in such times that many people seek community, trust and connection, yet that very impulse carries the risk of its opposite: when a sense of commonality tips into hostility towards the other or another group, it becomes something mean. What can art do to bridge differences and forge connections between people, places and ways of seeing?

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Especially in industrialized nations soils are still viewed as inert, exploited merely as a resource for human use. The degradation of soil quality, as a global issue, reflects this exploitation. However, the ecological turn has transformed our perception of soil, seeing it as a dynamic, living substance. This panel takes up that shift viewing soil alive, not solely through its composition but also through its properties, in which no entity stands on its own but is always ‘a making in company with’. Soil is considered an active, agentive substance with relational and transformative capacities in socio-ecological systems.

Panel convenors: Marjolijn Dijkman & Anna Kuijpers
With contributions by: Anne-Katrin Broocks; Juan Martin Dabezies; Ruby de Vos & Marjolijn Dijkman; Rye Hickman; Saana Hokanen, Anna Kuijpers; Kate Monson

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Edited by Géraldine Gourbe and Fanny Lopez, Power Up explores this dimension through a meeting of art, the history of technology, and critical reflection. The contributions bring together historians of architecture, the environment, and technology, alongside philosophers, political scientists, journalists, activists, and artists, all engaged with a shared question: what do infrastructures reveal about the forms of power that structure our contemporary societies?

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Conversation published in Commodity Frontiers Journal: The Confluence of European Water Bodies or How to Flow Together, with Marjolijn Dijkman, Christiane Bosman, Pietro Consolandi and Xandra van der Eijk.

The Confluence of European Water Bodies explores and embodies new ways to effectively represent water, raising fundamental questions about who decides, who speaks, and how rights are enforced in a world still dominated by human-centered systems. This conversation explores how art plays a crucial role in this shift by creating an emotional, cultural, and philosophical space for change.

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The exhibition “Unbounded within – Symbiotic Subjectivities” explores the fading boundaries between human and environment in an era when ecological crisis and technological development force us to rethink our place in the world. It is a journey from “I” to “we,” where “we” encompasses not only other humans, but also bacteria, the fungal kingdom, the atmosphere, and mineral flows.

Participating artists: Claudio Beorchia, Anna Birgita Erikson, Marjolijn Dijkman, Feral Practice, Laura Harrington, Toril Johannessen, Elo Liiv, Christine Mackey, Alyona Movko-Mägi, Maria Nalbantova, Kristina Norman

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‘Conductive Solidarity’ is an iterative outdoor event on the edge of the Ems-Dollard engaging in a “collaborative microscopy session”, where we decenter the individual, scientific perspective and instead find collaborative, pluralistic ways of thinking with electro-active cable bacteria, embedded in the landscape. This session brings together a range of different researchers and thinkers to set off an interdisciplinary chain of reflections in which we can learn from each other and think together, embedded in the landscape where the cable bacteria live.

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How can we rethink our connection to the living world in times of ecological urgency and societal uncertainty? As cities grow denser and digital life accelerates, The Foragers: Engagements Beyond the Human invites you to rediscover your relationship with our environment — not just in remote wilderness, but in the overlooked spaces of everyday urban life. This interdisciplinary art-science project brings together artists, researchers, and enthusiasts who reclaim the ancient practice of foraging as a bold, imaginative, and future-facing method. 

The exhibition explores foraging through installations, artworks, and site-specific interventions, both within the gallery walls and beyond.

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This debate examines ecocide caused by war: the large-scale and often long-lasting destruction of ecosystems through armed conflict.

Moderator and journalist Selma Franssen brings together perspectives from the worlds of art, law and research, with artist and researcher Marjolijn Dijkman; Omar Ferwati, an architect and researcher at Forensic Architecture; and artist, architect and researcher Shayma Nader and Babs Verhoeve, an expert in environmental justice and environmental crime at the Belgian Federal Government. This programme is part of ‘The Foragers,’ organised by VUB Crosstalks.

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Oscillation ::: from the Mothership focuses on the technologies, tools, and techniques that are an important part of the apparatus of music-making. The festival departs from the observation that cultures are shaped by the way technologies are used, rather than by the intention behind their design. But while technologies might be invented with a certain goal for use in mind and against a backdrop of specific socio-political situations, this junction can be severed and new constellations and findings can emerge. Historically, new technologies have in this way often opened up spaces for marginalised or excluded artists to realise their music without constraints such as manuals or a canon.

On the opening night of the festival, Pom Bouvier b. and Marjolijn Dijkman will perform ‘Electrify Everything’. The performance translates the seductive and captivating magic of demonstrations of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment into a critical exploration of the origins of the units and language used to measure electricity.

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Between the Lines and Natura Rebellis are an installation by artist Marjolijn Dijkman with a music composition by composer Henry Vega. In dialogue with a poetic film essay, a robot orchestra drums on dead tree trunks from a protected forest near Verdun. This multimedia artwork shows how a landscape struggles with the aftermath of human conflict, against a backdrop of drought and climate change. Henry Vega provided the music for the robot orchestra and also wrote the occasionally intervening tandem work Natura Rebellis for three singers.

Klarafestival is the largest broadcast festival for classical music in Belgium. Every year in March, captivating (inter)national soloists and ensembles bring classical, jazz, and contemporary creations to life at various cultural venues in Brussels, including Bozar and Flagey.”

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The Forest Encounters book invites you into the forest and its many meanings. It brings together voices from different disciplines, geographies, and cultures. Artists, foresters, art historians, philosophers, anthropologists, wildlife researchers, landscape architects, and writers all participate in this collective reflection on the diverse meanings, challenges, and perspectives related to the forest.

Edited by Urška Jurman and Mateja Kurir
Contributors: Giovanni Aloi, Daniela Brasil and Nayarí Castillo, T. J. Demos, Marjolijn Dijkman, Dušica Dražić, Katharina Flich, Maja Fowkes and Reuben Fowkes, Lea Hartmeyer, Urška Jurman, Agata A. Konczal, Miha Krofel, Ana Kučan, Mateja Kurir, Polonca Lovšin, Felicita Medved, Teo Hrvoje Oršanič, Borut Peterlin, Bojana Piškur, Titta C. Raccagni, Zoe Jo Rae, Alex Schuurbiers

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The exhibition project Botanizing the Asphalt explores the political role of light in urban spaces at night. Examining the materiality of night and its sensorial, normative, and atmospheric aspects, the potential of the nocturnal as a community meeting space unfolds against the backdrop of pressing social, ecological, and political contexts. The title of the exhibition is inspired by Walter Benjamin’s description (1938) of how the flâneur experiences the city emotionally while wandering the streets, using an allegorical connection to nature. In this manner, the show traces dreamlike forms of meditation on resistance, memory, identity, and place – and thereby opens a broader discourse on the power dynamics embedded in light and dark, visibility and obscurity, the observer and observed.

Artists: Ana Vaz, Alexandre Estrela, Anna Schachinger, Haig Aivazian, Hugo de Almeida Pinho, Jonathan Uliel Saldanha, Marjolijn Dijkman, Pedro Henriques, Younes Ben Slimane. Curated by Sara Castelo Branco.

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Marjolijn Dijkman will conceive the fourth exhibition in the annual programme ‘TERRA DIASPORA’ with curator Stephan Klee. The solo presentation will feature three different bodies of work, including a series of new productions.

The immersive setting of ‘Between the Lines’ will guide the audience through these impressive installations of geo-topographical processes across the 392 square meters of the Altes Rathaus. The exhibition will focus on water systems, rare earth elements, and the current state of a former WWI battlefield, highlighting the fault lines between political territories.

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The group exhibition exposes different ways where exhaustion in the broadest sense is used as a tool and method of colonial power and capitalist systems. Here, exhaustion is not just a metaphorical or psychological consequence. It is structural, imposed, and weaponized by systems of domination which exhaust humans amongst other natural resources to the point of annihilation.

With: Tala Abdalhadi; Diana Al-Halabi; Moses Maerz; Naomi Rincón-Gallardo; Sara Sallam; Firas Shehadeh; Jean Katambayi/Sammy Baloji/Daddy Tshikaya/Marjolijn Dijkman

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The live performance Electrify Everything, Marjolijn Dijkman and Pom Bouvier b. translates the seductive and captivating magic of demonstrations of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment into a critical exploration of the origins of the units and language used to measure electricity. The field of electricity has been developed, manipulated, and named for three centuries to control and apply it.

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