Estelle Zhong Mengual - philosopher and art historian, author of Apprendre á voir (Leren Kijken) - started her Zoop Connections programme with Nieuwe Instituut in April and is currently back in the Netherlands for her second leg, familiarizing herself further with Zoöp processes and practices. Throughout her work and during this workshop, she asks us: how can we enter into regenerative relationships with the living world, and how can we find meaning through new ways of seeing?

What can lichens tell us about a place? Follow these collaborative becomings 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.

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.

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;.

I will not be able to join the programme from 15:30 - 16:30, but i will join the plenary discussion