What if a space existed to respond to human needs, not with forced positivity, but with the quiet acceptance of what is? A place where rest is a ritual, where food and shelter are offered freely, and where the rhythm of life slows to a more human, or perhaps a more-than-human pace. On the 16th of May Mediamatic transformed into a space where reflection and experiment are welcome, marking the beginning of a new programme inspired by the reverence of monastery living.
Borrowing from ASMR mukbang—a genre of online eating show in which a host consumes food and amplifies the sounds of eating and drinking to trigger a viewer’s autonomous sensory meridian response—Kexin immerses visitors in a four-course meal and guides them into a world where guts morph into worms and tongues fondle soil. TitledLewdBanquet, here the human digestive system, culinary routines, and sexual rituals intermingle with decomposing processes and compost organisms.
A collective performance with Marjolijn van Heemstra. You don't have to wait for nightfall to experience the darkness. Just after sunset, the great transition begins: twilight. The golden hour turns into the blue hour, the light fades, and colours become cooler. We often associate the falling of darkness with disappearance. The light, the day, the noise—all seem to diminish. But the day doesn’t disappear. We do. And as we fade away, something else appears. Bats. Moths. A world of greys.
house, a publication, represents the culmination of Rosa Vrij's artistic and personal research over many years, focusing on the themes of giving and taking space, bundled in a publication. The audience reads and experiences this book in the form of an interactive book presentation. During the performative book presentation, the audience goes through this archive, slowly becoming part of a journey through architectural, personal and emotional spaces themselves. For how do you actually relate to others and to the space around you?
Inspired from the endangered southern Italian mediterranean coasts, this is a table which stands as a cut out of an habitat, an edible landscape to be explored through a special cutlery. This dining platform is designed by Salicornia Studio to host events and collective tasting experiences where the public is allowed to take action and try and embody one of those critters, to possibly feel what they feel and eat what they would eat.
Imagine the quiet scent of a monastery library, old parchment mingled with the spicy aroma of dried herbs and resins. Mediamatic will open its doors on the evening of Friday, May 16th, introducing its new concept: the Open City Monastery. To complement this, Frank Bloem designed a unique incense scent.
Since food is an essential part of a monastery and fosters communal connection, we invited Mediamatic's audience to visit our Hydroponics greenhouse during the night. There, they were surprised by the diverse fermentation processes explained by the TestTafel team.
Confessions can be relieving, empowering, and cathartic, even creating a communal moment. Step aside from the constraints and expectations of modern society and join Dante Woods on a path of fetish where sharing your darkest secrets can be safe.
Minji Kim's research at Mediamatic focused on hydro infrasound in the Oosterdok, exploring how human activities impact the auditory experiences of underwater organisms. Engines typically emit infrasound, which falls outside the usual hearing range for humans; however, some non-human species communicate and survive using infrasound.
Teun Vonk creates art installations that focus on individual physical experiences, as a reminder to the participant of what the body is and what it is capable of. By offering subtle, sensory stimuli The Meditation Circus offers an opportunity for connection with our body and mind. After the experience, there is a short sharing round in which everyone can share what they have experienced.
Eve Merriel Hurst is a British artist-designer specialising in multi-sensory experiences and immersive spatial storytelling.This sensory fountain creates a space for vital conversations around psychosomatic health: conditions that affect both the body and mind. The womb-like interior centres on mugwort, a medicinal plant used by herbalists for holistic healing and enhancing intuition. Cleansing hands in the fountain's flow of water and aromatic mugwort is grounding and calming. Meeting in the space also facilitates reflection and open discussion, building a supportive community over time. As participants learn that their experiences are shared by others, the internalised taboo inherent in many psychosomatic conditions begins to melt away.
Composing Lullabies for Floods, for not being afraid of sleeping when rain falls again, is a practice of weatherscaping. The Lullaby for Floods installation was the creation of a sonic environment and an in-between space connecting us to the Earthly turbulences in the new climate regime: it exchanged our inner floods with external droughts, and we escaped our inner droughts to swallow into external floods. The dance of the water particles ran as we were spectators of present ruins/future ghosts and composers of present ghosts/future ruins.
How can we humans be better actors in the world we dwell in? The Mycelium-Waste-Pigeon-Towers are our teachers; Observe, make, reflect on the ever-changing towers who host many beings. This will take time, and we shall take our time; be part of a community that crosses generations, discipline and species. We builded the towers together with artist and researcher on human ecology Arne Hendriks. He believes we should be more generous towards ourselves in allowing radical new ideas and practices to re-define our relationship with the planet.
On the brick wall in the restaurant of TestTafel, we put an adaptation of Alaa Abu Asad’s ongoing project 'The Dog Chased Its Tail To Bite It Off'. Struck by the intensity of the language used around the plant, Abu Asad has spent five years compiling a list of nearly 400 words that are used to refer to the Japanese knotweed. The violent nature of the terms bears resemblance to the insulting language often directed toward human migrants.
Every day, we either observe others or are observed by them. Unwritten rules, shaped by societal norms and personal boundaries, determine when and for how long we engage in the act of looking. With this work Renske Tiemersma wants to challenge and dismantle these unwritten rules around observation, extending an open invitation to both look and be looked at.
Water flows through every aspect of our lives. It is a force that is at once essential and powerful, yet deeply endangered. In our world, water is often silent in the face of political and legal decisions that determine its fate.
This exhibition invites you into a new conversation, a growing movement that imagines a world where water is no longer voiceless. We ask you to consider:What would happen if water could speak for itself?
Commissioned by Embassy of the North Sea, ILP Mar Menor, TBA21–Academy/Ocean Space
Thank You for Calling (Met Wie Spreek Ik) is a short, magical-realistic film installation about Rens (37), a director of a music venue who is on the brink of a burn-out. After an emotional breakdown, he is unexpectedly called by Herman (65), an unknown man on a houseboat. What starts as an uncomfortable phone call, ends in an absurd, musical journey towards connection and self-insight. Creators Vera Lelie and Kwint Jongerius, both neurodivergent, use their own experiences with autism to explore themes such as masking, exhaustion, and social scripts. The film moves beyond stereotypes, offering space for discomfort, vulnerability, and imagination.
Where We Sleep is an exhibition transforming Mediamatic’s greenhouses into intimate, temporary sleeping spaces, inspired by the places where Sophie Conroy slept while she lived without a permanent home. This installation explored how rest and comfort are increasingly confined to private spaces, highlighting the growing absence of public spaces that support basic human needs.
By reimagining the dining table as a playscape, mexican food designer Alejandra Alarcón this project empowers individuals to explore with their bodies, experiment freely, and create food combinations that encourage reflections on our dining rituals. The shared wooden surface, reminiscent of a food preparation area, provides a space where making a mess is acceptable and encouraged. Play becomes a means of engaging creatively and meaningfully, while emphasizing touch as a mindful and intimate way of eating, one that challenges conventional social and cultural norms.
EAT is an installation performance series initiated in 2023 by Tomoko Mukaiyama. It explores the rituals of morning practices and the subtle interplay between cultural habits and natural forces that shape them. Over the course of a one-hour sound experience, EAT unfolds as a five-course journey featuring foraged ingredients and plants that thrive in saltwater and wet conditions. A meditative gateway into the day, EAT invites us to tune into the body, to sound, to taste, and to the landscapes we inhabit. In collaboration with designer Matilde Stolfa and musician Shannon Lee.
Is there a place that could have preserved fragments of the city throughout its history?
For example, ‘under the harbour’ could consist not only of water but also of everything that has existed at Oosterdok and been decomposed up to this very moment, such as construction materials, ships from the Dutch East Indies and spices, the sweat of workers, fish, possibly some bicycles, and living drainage, among other things. Even now, new elements are being decomposed and combined with the existing environment, which in turn ultimately becomes part of the harbour.
Ever knew that the Oosterdok hides plenty of historical and cultural landmarks? Mediamatic hosted an event on the 13th of September as part of Open Monument Day. Visitors learned about the history of the Sluisdeurenloods (Canal Lock Gate Warehouse) and experienced the immersive sonic installation hosted inside, where water particles ran as they were spectators of present ruins and future ghosts.
The building was officially declared a municipal cultural landmark in 2022. Subsequently, the building was used for Mediamatic's public lectures, exhibitions, and as an event space. During the Open Monument Day, it hosted a live sonic composition and a performative installation by artist and architect Letizia Artioli.
The Green Train is an interdisciplinary contemporary art program designed to deepen public awareness of, and engagement with, European landscapes. It highlights the environmental advantages of train travel, using one of Europe’s most iconic international train lines as its conceptual foundation and starting point.
At its heart, The Green Train is a simple idea: travel more slowly, listen more deeply, and act more boldly for the planet by living more ecologically – and by planting trees. The Green Train becomes a moving venue for reflection, conversation, and creativity, with tree planting along the route and a dedicated “Tree Wagon” inside the train, gifted to all traveling passengers.
Every month olfactory artist Frank Bloem curates a program where experts, artists, designers and scientists shift our perspectives on what we eat, drink, touch, inhale, secrete and smell. These so called "lower senses" are not only placed lower in our body but also were considered through history as lesser, more banal and not sophisticated. We think differently. Starting from a simple theme with a thought provoking question, we go on a journey and inviting people from different disciplines to discover the world that lies behind everyday phenomena.
The Gramounce is an organisation reconceptualising the world through food. Establishing food as a legitimate discipline in the arts, and a valid vehicle to build meaning. Through it, they aim to establish food and cooking as inherent signifiers of human culture. Every year The Gramounce spends a residency week at Medimatic with 40 international students in relation to food, art and science.
Grain of Salt is a project focusing on the relationship between greenery and water. To care for the green opulence of the Dijksgracht, we use over a quarter of a million liters of water per year. To save precious drinking water, we now irrigate our plants directly with the brackish water from the Oosterdok. Not all plants can withstand that, so we will welcome more and more salt-tolerant plants into our Biotope. This project will thus not only result in practical water savings, but also puts the problem of increasing salinization in the Netherlands on the agenda, and will make visible what a brackish landscape can look like.
We know that we need to start listening to nature. But communication with the rest of the ecosystem has proven itself difficult. Artist Anne Hofstra has build an Artificial Language Model to see what happens when we try to let AI speak for nature. How does that work? What does it look like?
Human history is one of extraction, exploitation, and dominance: we don’t seem to be able to listen to nature’s wants and needs. And yet, we are tasked with listening—not just with our ears, but with our hearts, with our minds, and with all the tools at our disposal. AI is a tool. Could it help amplify this listening?
The project investigated the history of the Sluisdeurenloods on the premises of Mediamatic, alongside dealing with the archaeological and natural finds that were uncovered during the excavations of the IJ Canal. In this way, Deep Time Agency related to the tension between culture, nature, and industry in Amsterdam. Cultural sites along the IJ river and Central Station, such as Mediamatic, were constantly under pressure from urban development plans that sought to give industry more space. By focusing on unusual finds, non-human influences, and historiography, Deep Time Agency, with their project Tides of Time, joined the Grain of Salt and Aquatoop programs, in which they critically related to the intrinsic value and threats to the aquatic worlds of the IJ Canal.
A Zoöp is an organization that collaborates with the ecosystem it is in, by applying a new way of organizing: Including the other-than-human life in the decision making process.
Since the other-than-human life forms don’t communicate in the same way as we do, an independent ‘Speaker for the living’ joins our team to translate and represent their needs. This person will help Mediamatic (as a Zoöp), to reach the symbiotic relationship with the ecosystem we are in: By taking the perspective of the other-than-human life forms and translating their needs into ecological advice – that can be used for decision making (at all levels) in Mediamatic. Our ‘Speaker for the living’ is Jolanda Verspagen.
You are an archaeologist of the future, and on one of your excavations you stumble upon something odd hidden in the soil; During your sailing trip across what once used to be “The Netherlands”, you encounter a mysterious creature, flapping around in the water; You inherit an aquarium from your great-great-great-grandparent, and in it a creature unlike anything else is living. What on Earth is that?
In this workshop with Minji Kim we will built a hydrophone capable of detecting underwater electromagnetic waves and explore the invisible electromagnetic flows in the bustling waters and waterfront areas of Amsterdam.
Are you looking to boost your mood by connecting with your environment? Lynn Shore will take you on a mindful guided session to explore ways to engage with everyday nature in order to support your mental health. You will learn to know a few useful plant friends and their health effects in your immediate surroundings through using your senses, as well as techniques you can use to ground yourself with city nature.
Humans are not able to control everything. In this workshop, the participants will experience the philosophy of kintsugi, which embraces the flawed or imperfect. They will practice to accept the way things are and letting go of control. How? By ritually breaking dishes and glueing them together again in novel and golden ways.
Aquaponics is a sustainable food production system that combines the cultivation of vegetables and fish. What are the advantages of this ecosystem? how does it work? what plants can you grow in it? and how can you build it yourself? After the introduction, participants build a mini version of the system to get a good understanding of the materials, building techniques, and the inner workings.
In this workshop, artist, and perfumer Frank Bloem introduces participants the world of perfume making. Visitors learn the basics of scent composing and at the end of the workshop, having theoretical knowledge on the principles of perfuming, on how to mix fragrant notes and on the difference between natural and synthetic smells.
Distillation is the process of extracting essential oils from plant based materials. We'll explore the process of transforming everyday citrus peels (orange, mandarin, lemon, lime)into fragrant essential oils. By adding plants that we sourced on the grounds of Mediamatic to the alembic, we create a unique essential oil mixture.
The Aroma Lab is set up for designers who want to experiment with scent. We have over 250 fragrances in our public library. After two hours, participants leave with a 10 ml bottle of their own mixed scent, a recipe, and a basic understanding of scent compositions.
Get a glimpse behind the scenes, peek inside our sensorial labs, and learn more about the bio-art installations around the Biotoop during our weekly tour on Friday. During the tour, visitors get the chance peek inside our labs, in which we explore the possibilities of bio-materials for design, science and art.
Meet-a-Maker is a 30-minute session to have a one-on-one talk with artists currently working at Mediamatic. We are lucky to be inspired by the many artists who work and stay with us for exhibitions, residencies and workshops. Throughout the year many visitors sat down with the artists to talk about their practice.
We are proud of our collaborations in 2025. Thanks to, among others TestTafel, Bureau Marineterrein, Expeditie Oosterdok, The Offline Club, Ambassade van de Noordzee, The Gramounce, Bierbrouwerij Homeland, Life Terra, Thinking Forest Foundation, Public Spaces, Waag FutureLab, Welna Estate, Nieuwe Instituut, The Finnish Enviromental Institute (Syke), Finnish Cultural Institute for the Benelux, Universiteit van Amsterdam, The Finnland-Institut in Berlin, Gemeente Amsterdam, Arcam, The Snifferoo, The Green Train, Bureau Broedplaatsen, Mediacollege, OBA, Schietbaan, NatureOptimist, and Zoönomisch Instituut for the great collaborations and support!
