Artist in residence: Marjolijn Boterenbrood

Future Skin of the City

2026: A Year Long Oosterdok Diary

Welcome to the logbook of Marjolijn Boterenbrood.
During her residency at Mediamatic, she documents her experiences here. Take a look into her creative process, thoughts, and discoveries on and around the place.

Future Skin of the City unfolds as a living logbook - not a record of fixed outcomes, but a practice of attentive navigation.

Traditionally, a log is both temporal and spatial: a tool for measuring distance travelled, speed and drift. It belongs to journeys where the destination is uncertain and progress is traced through observation and adjustment. Marjolijn’s diary adopts this logic, using passing days, encounters, materials and moods as coordinates. Through images, videos and written notes, it charts a year not as a straight line, but as a process of speculation, asking what it means to move forward when the route is still being invented.

As part of her residency at Mediamatic in 2026, this logbook acts as both companion and compass for Marjolijn’s ongoing research and making. It remains deliberately open-ended, inviting readers to return, linger and drift alongside the work as it unfolds.

Marjolijn Boterenbrood

Marjolijn Boterenbrood is a multidisciplinary artist whose works primarily revolve around the concepts of space and places through sensory impressions. Boterenbrood works through these subjects to reveal the hidden intrinsic aspects of the certain places that she visits. Through this, the places can be fully understood through the different dimensions that have been accentuated in Boterenbrood’s works.

Logbook

A log tells of time and space: “A navigation instrument with which the speed or distance traveled by a vessel is determined (or both). An important instrument for establishing a ‘dead reckoning/gegist bestek’ in dutch. Dead reckoning being - what am I going to do at Mediamatic?

Marjolijn Boterenbrood foto research - Future skin of the city

Winter

January 10
It starts well. It’s snowing, it’s freezing, there's fog and there's ice. Water in its other form. Everything frozen except the Oosterdok; there was too much wind there.

January 12
Foggy, 'poor visibility', my father would say. All my rolls of fabric and drawings are taken to the Dijksgracht/Oosterdokskade. Still there's fog. In the greenhouse at the Oosterdok it feels as if I’m on a ship, at sea looking out over a shimmering surface without a horizon. It almost moves. What is beneath me? At sea you also don’t see what lives below the surface.

January 14
09:04 winter sunrise. Still, no wind. Dew-covered windows catch the blinking patterns. In the greenhouse it already becomes frighteningly warm. Short day, sunset at 16:48. Pink water. The sun’s arc describes only just over a quarter of the horizon around.

January 16
In the Sluisdeurenloods it is just as cold as outside. The low light flickers and sparkles through it.

January 20
Jolanda Verspagen, phytoplankton ecologist at the University of Amsterdam, is the “speaker for the living” at Mediamatic. She wants to evoke empathy for non-human life. She saw my drawings of diatoms but immediately noted that I was mixing all sorts of things together. If I were to call it plankton, it would be correct. Zoé, Dewi, and Puk from Mediamatic filmed the underwater work, with beautiful green light.

January 26
Silver gleams the sluggish, ice-cold water. The attachment of my encrusting metal plates works itself loose from the rotten wooden fender. Repairs with Jeroen.

January 28
Works are hung in the barn.

January 29
Surrounded by blinding white: snow. White is the colour with which one makes offerings at a spring or a mountain pass or other sacred places, in the Altai in Siberia: milk, ayran, butter or kumis (fermented mare’s milk).

February 2

Full moon. Dark night, i only see one planet and the stars of Orion. Nooteboom writes: ‘For sailors at sea, the sky should be as clear as a map’. Freezing east-wind blows through the barn. A good soups works warming. Yesterday, the light flickered through. Jeroen has adjusted some lamps for the grey days.

February 4

A warmer day in between, you can smell it, it's sweet, mossy, canal water.

February 11

Piercing East-wind. The inside of the barn is just as cold as outside. Around 2 degrees. I work on the series of Plankton drawings, our oxygen makers. The rain almost freezes on my body on the way home.

February 17

The Chinese newyear Het Chinese nieuwjaar begint, de Ramadan, carnaval en daarna een vastenperiode tot pasen, allemaal verbonden met nieuwe maan. Het begin van de ‘witte maand’ Mongools lunar-nieuwjaar dan eet je witte dingen eet als melk, boter, ayran: connotaties met puurheid, het eerste eten van een baby en het nomadenbestaan, vertelde Natalia Papaeva me.

February 19

Het blijft gruwelijk koud, Voorbereiding van de openingsavond van Mediamatic in volle gang, test van mijn onderwaterleven-gewaad. Voor het eerst ruik ik mest, aankondiging van warmer weer. Diverse dagen werk ik aan het naaien van de tekeningen op de slierten voor mn gewaad.

February 24

Na storm en woest water om ons heen stilte en mist. Afgelopen vrijdag de publieksopening Hydrocommons van Mediamatic met Silke Riis en Enora Cressan. Met mijn ‘habijt’ van vilt sleepte ik (tekeningen van) het onderwaterleven met me mee. Slierten met eetbare tekeningen van kiezeldieren en plankton. Het publiek at de tekeningen zodat de waterorganismen een deel van je lichaam werden. De O van zuurstof in de vorm van een schepnet en een vergrootglas, de zuurstof die al die organismen samen al miljoenen jaren maakt.

March 2

Stralend weer. Deze maand werk ik met Mark IJzerman, vandaag startten we de samenwerking met een hydrofoon luisteren naar onderwater, Ik denk al direct vissen te horen maar het blijkt een slijptol in de verte.