Residency
2023–2026: Ems-Dollard Estuary, NL & DE
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‘ (2023-2026).
Artists: Maria Nalbantova (Bulgaria), Elo Liiv (Estonia), Christine Mackey (Ireland), Claudio Beorchia (Italy), Marjolijn Dijkman (Netherlands), and Laura Harrington and Fiona MacDonald(Feral Practice) (United Kingdom).
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. This will lead to presentations from 2026 to 2028.
Turbid Tides explores the parallels between rising siltation in the estuary and the expanding influence of computational thinking, with silt and data as its twin protagonists. The research traces a series of paradigm shifts across this particular landscape over time: from the animistic worldviews of pre-Christian mound dwellers living in a tidal landscape, to the Cartesian dualism that shaped reclamation projects, to Freud’s psychoanalytic reading of Dutch land reclamation, and on to current transformations in Western thought about sentience, intelligence, and agency. The project will result in a series of artworks, an essay film, and a publication exploring shifts in how we understand our place in a more-than-human world.
