Zoöp Connections - residencies, regeneration and cultural relations

Date: November 12, 2025
Time: 15:30 - 18:30
Venue: Nieuwe Instituut, Auditorium, Museumpark 25, 3015 EK Rotterdam

How can artists and designers help us to redefine our relation to social and natural ecosystems in a way that supports more life? How do we shape a residency programmes with regenerative principles, and why is this important? And what role play cultural relations organisations in a larger transformation?

This year, five Dutch Zoops all hosted a resident who offers an alternative way to experiencing a world that centers around more-than-human life. Estelle Zhong Mengual (France), Fabian Schäfer (Germany), Yolanda Uriz (Spain), Kapinga Muela Kabeya (Flanders), and Ashley Holmes (United Kingdom) were immersed within five Dutch organisations that commit to improving the health of their ecosystems in a time of waning biodiversity and climate catastrophe.

Initiated by EUNIC Netherlands, coordinated by DutchCulture and the Zoönomic Institute, we invite you to our ongoing learning process about regenerative cultural relations surrounding those three questions.

During this programme you will get the opportunity to meet some of the five residents through workshops. We start with these workshops taking place in and around the Nieuwe Instituut to explore the different ways in which we make use of sensing and embodied practice to start noticing all that lives in our direct ecosystem.

15:30 - 16:15 - During these 45-minute slots, you can join any of the following workshop pods:

Pod 1 - "Learning to see" by Estelle Zhong Mengual
Estelle Zhong Mengual - philosopher and art historian, author of Apprendre á voir (Leren Kijken) - followed an exchange programme with Nieuwe Instituut in April and is currently back for her second leg, familiarizing herself further with Zoöp-thinking and practice. Throughout her work and during this workshop, she asks: how can our culture deepen our ecological relationships, and how can we find meaning in new ways of seeing?

Pod 2 - Follow the lichens with Fabian Schäfer
What can lichens tell us about an ecosystem? Follow these collaborative beings with Fabian Schäfer, visual artist, treeworker, mountain climber and student of lichen. Fabian spent 10 days of his residency this year in a small boat at Zoöp de Ceuvel, where he studied moss and lichen life on post-industrial concrete terrain.

Pod 3 - Acoustic Counter-mapping - a listening exercise by Ashley Holmes
Ashley Holmes is an artist interested in publishing, broadcasting and experimental approaches to working with sound. During his time at Kunstfort Vijfhuizen he was responding to the natural acoustics of the site, paying attention to things like distance, scale and the mutualistic relationships of the more-than-human that form a wider ecosystem of the fort and surrounding areas. For the workshop session Ashley will perform a short improvised sound composition, made up of layers of field recordings and samples collected during the Zoöp residency, inviting people to consider the ways listening to echo and delay can act as traces of the temporal, the geographical, and the historical.  

Pod 4 - an introduction to the Zoop Model by Klaas Kuitenbrouwer
For those unfamiliar, you can join this brief presentation on the basic idea of a Zoöp. You will be introduced to all the basic principles and working methods of a Zoöp: What is the role of a Speaker for the Living? How do you work with a Speaker for the Living? How does a Zoöp baseline measurement work, and how does the learning process of the zoönomic annual cycle work? How do you work together with non-human life? You will experience what it is like to look at an organization as an ecosystem with both human and non-human participants, and will be given tools to assess the health of this ecosystem; Based on this, you will get new ideas about what needs to change and what decisions you need to make to promote the quality of life of the entire Zoöp;.

16:30 - 17:45 - Presentations by the 5 Zoöp Connections
With our senses stimulated and our awareness heightened, join us the auditorium to join a plenary discussion. First off, moderator Kirsten van den Hul will briefly speak to Klaas Kuitenbrouwer, founder of Zoonomic Foundation, about his view on this project. After that, we learn about all the Zoops and the residents that visited them this year. What did they actually do from day to day? The Zoops, facilitating institutes and the artists reflect on their role and purpose was in this project and share they have learned, in light of the question how do you design a residency in a regenerative way? Was this experience different than other residencies, and other ways of organising cultural relations? What implications might this have?

17:45 - 18:15 - Open Q&A

The word Zoöp is short for Zoöperation. It combines the word 'cooperation', with the Greek word 'zoë' (ζωή) for life.
It is both an organisation form and learning process that incorporates non-human perspectives into decision-making, advancing regenerative practice.

The Dutch Zoöp-model was developed at Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, the first Zoöp in the world, and set up the Zoönomic Institut to grow the Zoöp network. Any organisation with an intrinsic motivation to contribute to the health of their ecosystems they are part of, can become a Zoöp and learn how to contribute to the well-being of their multispecies communities.

Zoöp Connections is an initiative of EUNIC Netherlands and is coordinated by DutchCulture and Nieuwe Instituut in collaboration with Zoönomic Institute.

The residencies were organised by the following duo’s, each pairing a Zoöp with a Cluster member of EUNIC Netherlands:

• Zoöp Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen and British Council Netherlands,
• Zoöp Stichting Bodemzicht/’t Gagel and Vlaams Cultuurhuis de Brakke Grond,
• Zoop De Ceuvel and Goethe-Institut Niederlande,
• Zoop Creative Coding Utrecht and Instituto Cervantes Utrecht,
• Zoop Nieuwe Instituut and Institut français NL.

This project is supported by the EUNIC Global Cluster Fund.