Hydrocommons highlights the deep entanglement of all water bodies (from oceans to our own bodies) and the complex natural and cultural shaped relationships that link them. It also promotes a shift in perspective, where humans become custodians or caretakers of water rather than just owners, emphasising water's inherent non-economic value and the need for responsible stewardship.
Simple Adult Forms by Danish artist Silke Riis challenges the modern obsession with exponential growth. In a culture that views starting over as a failure, Riis looks to biology in order to find an alternative narrative. By exploring the life cycles of species that can shrink, revert, or simplify to survive, she questions the current hierarchies of success and aging. Through the lens of reverse metamorphosis, the installation suggests that regressing is not a defeat, but a strategic and beautiful adaptation. Over the course of the year, the installation itself will undergo its own slow metamorphosis. These sculptures are not static; they are metabolic. They will breathe, sag, and transform, mirroring the fluid nature of the ecosystems they represent.
Future Skin of the City is Marjolijn Boterenbrood's Marjolijn's logbook, 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.During her one year residency at Mediamatic, one year long artist Marjolijn Boterenbrood she documents her experiences here. Take a look into her creative process, thoughts, and discoveries on and around the place.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.
Anatomy of a Material by material designer Enora Cresan addresses what Enora calls affective obsolescence: the gradual loss of emotional and sensory connection to the materials that shape our everyday lives. Through different degrees of transformation, shifts of scale, displacement or alteration, materials may begin to appear otherwise. Such transformation can unfold in the manner of a slow craft practice, grounded in sustained attention to the material itself, where time, repetition, and touch become conditions for renewed perception.
These material studies examine the threshold at which something is considered finished, negligible, ready to disappear. Where does abandonment begin? And who decides what deserves to vanish?
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.
HABITS marks the opening of our second residency period in which we provide an Open Stage for the rituals that find no host. Rituals are biological tools for survival. Amsterdam is, literally, designed for movement, not for a sense of belonging. We are rushing through the public space, in a world where we are more informed (yet more paralysed) than ever. We are drowning in an overflow of information we cannot process, and in that noise, we risk becoming numb to the very things that should move us. Within 12 consecutive hours we tested if our bodily regulations can also heal a city.
HABITS provided an Open Stage for the rituals that cannot find a home in the rest of the city. We hosted artists, neighbours, researchers, anthropologists, witches, scientists, monks, more-than-humans... essentially anyone—or anything—that wanted to perform a ritual within our space.
Exhibitions 2026
Open City Monastery, shared space for making and thinking
Have you ever wondered how the underwater smells like? Or what scents surround the aquatic species? Under the Harbour is a participatory exhibition by Mariko Hori that brings the smell of the Oosterdok from the depths of Amsterdam’s docks to the canals of your ears by translating smell into sound.
Phygital Seasoning is the first prototype exploring a future-proof food system that challenges how we define, design, and experience food. It is a mixed-reality spatial design that uses augmented perception to influence how we taste — not by changing ingredients, but by changing the sensory context around them.
At its core lies the Mono-Product concept: a single, nutritionally optimized base food that can be digitally “seasoned” through light, sound, color, and scent to suit individual preferences. Instead of endless physical variations - pre-sweetened yoghurts, flavored sodas, chips or other ultra-processed foods - one base product can become endlessly adaptable, reducing overproduction, waste, packaging, and marketing excess.
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.
Sanitation is important to all living beings in and around the city monastery. Because not all beings share the same notion of sanity, perfumer and scent designer Frank Bloem composed a wide range of scents that fit the diversity of our community which you can find around Mediamatic's Living Labs.
Wild Hedges: Waste/lands brings together two connected parts: Wild Hedges, the collective’s long-term research into species labelled “invasive” and ecologies labelled “wastelands”, and Waste/lands, a site-specific continuation rooted in Amsterdam’s Oosterdok.
Wild Hedges is an ongoing research project by Al-Wah’at Collective examining the ecological and socio-political complexities of the prickly pear cactus and the cochineal insect across multiple geographies, communities, and temporalities. The project questions anthropocentric and colonial approaches to species we regard as “invasive”. Through fibres, pigments, and food, Wild Hedges explores how material experimentation can cultivate practices of care within changing environments.
Soft Sabotage is a private intervention within a public system which invites visitors to reflect on their relationship with one seeminlgy mundane part of everyday life and how it quietly becomes part of a larger system of data and control. Presented as a spatial installation at Mediamatic's restroom, Julia Löffler's Soft Sabotage engages with wastewater surveillance - a public health tool that collects biochemical residues from sewage to monitor drug use, stress levels, nutrition and other population-wide health indicators.
Future Affair is a research and art project that allows two participants to give and receive affective touch over a distance using the interactive elements of the installation (sculpture and machine).
A ceramics sculpture works as a control panel for a caressing machine. By stroking the curved surface of the ceramics sculpture, one visitor activates the caressing machine for the other visitor by moving the three silicone fingers which are heated to a bodily temperature. The fingers are mimicking the direction of the stroke of the first participant, while moving at a constant speed of 3,1 cm/s which is the optimal speed to activate the C-Tactile Afferents (nerve endings in our hairy skin which respond most vigorously to slow light touch and are responsible for feelings of bonding).
In this edition of the Aromatheque series, curated by olfactory artist Frank Bloem, artist and performer Livia Rita joined the session to explore the concept of shapeshifting across human, animal, and more-than-human realms. Looking at transformations ranging from natural bodily shifts like kareishū (the Japanese term for the smell of aging) to radical biological metamorphosis, Livia shared how her practice uses ArtFashion and wearable sculptures as transformative skins. The gathering invited participants to reflect on identity, gender, and nature through the lower senses, using scent, texture, and embodiment to reimagine the boundaries of the human form.
What might a mythology of plastic look like, and how do we rebuild an emotional connection to the synthetic materials that shape our lives?
This symposium on affective obsolescence explored the gradual erosion of our sensory and emotional connections to everyday materials, focusing particularly on plastic's cultural transition from endless novelty to morally devalued waste. Centered around Enora Cressan’s research at Mediamatic, the event featured perspectives from material designers, earth scientists, and artistic researchers including Enora Cressan, Misha, Basse Stittgen, and Lina. Together, the speakers and participants examined how synthetic materials became affectively obsolete long before their physical lives ended. The discussion highlighted the role of design, material research, and cultural storytelling in fostering a culture of care, maintenance, and symbolic depth for plastic, proposing that meaningful ecological transition requires shifting how we relate to, cherish, and reimagine synthetic matter.
As part of Week van de Groene Kriebels, a celebration of local green initiatives in the Nieuwmarktbuurt, this screening featured two films connecting local land struggles with global movements: Bodem voor de toekomst by Eyewonder Doclab and In the Trace of Tilled Stones by Nesie Wang. Audience members gathered to watch the screenings and explore the shared themes of environmental care and land activism.
What does it feel like to have your curiosity pulled into 30 interests at once, to long for structure while resisting it, or to find that searching for flow becomes a perfectionist goal in itself?
In this second chapter of Unfolding Universes, performance maker and visual artist Rosa Vrij shared new texts and drawings from her ongoing research into neurodivergence, sensory details, and creative flow. The intimate evening featured Rosa reading her texts alongside projected drawings, while inviting the audience to engage through optional guided meditation, drawing, and sensory moments. Sitting between an artist talk and an interactive performance game, the event moved into the creative process itself, offering participants a space to reflect on the intersections between neurodiversity, space, and slowness within a fast-paced environment.
In the immersive live performance Dystopia Wetlands, presented in the Sluisdeurenloods at Mediamatic, Livia Rita and the Avantgardeners created a sonic ritual of earthy electronics, sirenesque vocals, movement, and visuals. The performance invited audiences into a speculative landscape between dystopia and utopia, where more-than-human creatures moved through states of metamorphosis. Activating a network of dancers across the Netherlands and beyond, the collective performed feminist, post-gender choreography that blurred bodily boundaries and explored fluid identity as a response to troubled times.
In this edition of the Aromatheque series, curated by olfactory artist Frank Bloem, María Salvadora Jiménez guided participants through the intricate process of selecting and low-temperature roasting high-quality cacao beans. Highlighting her work with small plantations in Mexico and South America, Jiménez shared how she collaborates with farmers to refine harvests and preserve delicate flavors lost in conventional high-heat processing. Attendees learned the secrets of premium cocoa selection and explored the nuances of flavor through a guided tasting, elevating olfactory and taste experiences as part of Aromatheque's ongoing investigation into the overlooked "lower senses."
What if everything in a radically neoliberal society was shaped by human labor instead of technology?
In this try-out performance, artist Rosa Vrij personally guided audience members through a fictional universe contained within a small suitcase. This "capitalist fairy tale" unfolded through miniatures, music boxes, comic drawings, and documents, depicting a world where acrobats acted as furniture, politicians played pool, teenagers launched themselves as brands, and a resistance group fought the system. As a playful, humorous exaggeration of modern logic, the performance served as a counterweight of meticulous handiwork and an ode to collective imagination in an efficiency-driven world.
Seated along the Oosterdok, guests shared stories tracing connections from Amsterdam’s local canals to the North Sea, freshwater lakes, and the glaciers of Tajikistan. This gathering marked the beginning of a living cartography, mapping relationships between bodies of water through shared food and stories. The menu brought this vision to life with edible plankton drawings, water kefir, water mint, fermented sea kale, samphire, saltwort, sea lavender, wakame, watercress soup, and a water popsicle with sea aster honey and spirits. Held at Mediamatic as part of Marjolijn Boterenbrood’s Future Skin of the City project, the Waterzooimaal event served as an exploration into living with water rather than merely beside it, inviting participants to reimagine urban quays and reflect on the possibilities of foraging directly from the city's waters.
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 Rederij Lampedusa, artist and chef Asli Haptipoglu and singer Claire Adams
Hosted in the Panorama Studio at Mediamatic, this participatory gathering invited guests to explore the world’s most elusive taste through conversation, experimentation, and shared discovery. Rather than a lecture or cooking class, attendees spent a relaxed Thursday evening around a table filled with umami-rich ingredients to taste, compare, and redefine the sensory experience together. Food lovers, designers, researchers, and curious participants experimented with perception, exploring how sensory attention influences taste and transforms the way we experience food.
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.
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.
In this Aroma Lab workshop you got introduced to scent extraction and the distillation process. Distillation is the process of extracting essential oils from plant based materials. We explored 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 created a unique essential oil mixture.
In this workshop, artist and perfumer Frank Bloem introduced participants to the world of perfume making. Attendees learned the basics of scent composing and gained theoretical knowledge on the principles of perfuming, how to mix fragrant notes, and the difference between natural and synthetic smells. Everyone went home with a 5 ml bottle of their own signature fragrance.
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.
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.
In the Deep Documenting workshop, artists, designers, researchers, and makers experimented with documentation as an active, intentional part of their practice. Participants explored diverse documentation models—drawing on methods developed at the project space Bubble Box—and practiced with visual, audio, and diagrammatic techniques. Guided through case studies and practical examples, attendees learned to treat documentation as a tool for research and reflection rather than simple record-keeping. Each participant developed a personalized documentation plan and left with practical tools to document their own projects.
This workshop invited participants to collectively imagine, embody, and build new creature identities together. Through a movement-led process, attendees explored transformation using sensory prompts like scent, tactile outfits, sound, and simple performative actions. Guided by shared rituals and playful experimentation, participants inhabited new forms and imagined alternative communities and ecosystems where bodies, environments, and stories merged. Tailored with a special focus on non-binary, genderfluid, and queer communities, the workshop was also presented as a short segment during an immersive evening performance at Mediamatic on May 1st.
What is it like to be you, and how do you see the world differently from someone else?
In this workshop, neurodivergent designer, storyteller, and researcher Amber van Gastel invited participants to explore alternative ways of communicating using her Detailed Talks card set. Rather than relying immediately on language, attendees engaged with visual prompts, objects, and associations to access intuition, metaphor, and personal narrative. The session provided a framework for slowing down, listening beyond words, and appreciating layered, diverse perspectives without needing to reconcile them. Grounded in van Gastel's research on neurodiversity and the limits of traditional communication, the workshop demonstrated how opening space for visual and associative expression fosters deeper, more human connection.
In this immersive World Ocean Day workshop, Drawing the Breath of the Ocean, ocean artivist Marion Moulen invited participants into the Haeckel Room for a meditative drawing experience centered on biological forms. Guided by the sounds of the ocean and a screening of Moulen’s art film, Planet Oxygen, attendees used sensory prompts to slow down and reconnect with the water's natural geometries. Drawing inspiration from Ernst Haeckel’s diatoms, participants learned specialized, observational drawing techniques Moulen developed during her residency at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, blending scientific observation with artistic meditation to connect with non-human life.
In this workshop, eco-architect and cultural practitioner Ikram Hamdi Mansour guided participants through a hands-on exploration of earth architecture. Beginning with a theoretical look at ancient, sustainable building techniques, the session reframed soil as a living, structural collaborator rather than a mere commodity. Attendees then engaged in a sensory, practical session in the Hydroponics greenhouse and garden. By testing and manipulating local soil, participants discovered firsthand how to transform raw earth into a viable, resilient building material through collective making.
In this workshop, artist and researcher Anđela Zora Brnas invited participants to explore the Mediamatic ecosystem through more-than-human imagination, movement, sensing, site research, and collective mapping. The session began with a guided movement and sensing exercise focused on noticing inner bodily ecosystems alongside the surrounding environment. After analyzing an ecosystem map of Mediamatic's living willow dome, participants conducted site explorations—using drawing, writing, sound recording, sample collection, and close observation to gather data. The workshop concluded with a shared mapping process where attendees traced connections across the site and reflected on their potential caring roles within the multispecies community.
In this hands-on workshop, participants helped build Museo Aero Solar, a collective inflatable sculpture made entirely from discarded plastic bags as part of the Synergy City initiative in Amsterdam. Attendees engaged in cutting, sorting, taping, layering, drawing, and assembling materials to construct a large-scale inflatable structure. Younger children participated by drawing on the plastic bags, while older participants and adults focused on the assembly process. The event also featured a Visitor Centre where attendees could learn more about the project and drop off used plastic bags.
How can we, as humans, with our crafting bodies and imagination, contribute to the local multispecies ecosystem?
Building on the observations and multispecies map created during the Sensing with the Ecosystem workshop, this session explored what designing with and within the ecosystem entails. After learning about the habitat needs of local species—such as shelter, food, water, movement, and nesting—participants dived into ancient willow weaving and basketry techniques to create functional structures for wildlife, including bird feeders, hedgehog houses, and duck shelters. Depending on their design, attendees either took their woven structures home or integrated them into Mediamatic’s Biotoop to support and reflect on human caring roles within the ecosystem.
What can seaweed teach us about the histories, ecologies, and cultures of the coast?
In the seventh edition of The Perennial Reading Group, hosted by artistic researcher and gardener Anne Diestelkamp, participants gathered for a multi-sensory reading of Miek Zwamborn’s The Seaweed Collector’s Handbook. Through shared reading and discussion, attendees explored the poetic reflections on marine ecologies, botanical history, and global seaweed cultures featured in Zwamborn’s work. The session combined excerpt readings with a tasting of seaweed dishes, inviting participants to practice close attention and consider how marine plants can reshape our relationship to coastal environments.
What forms of community emerge when we treat microscopic life as a co-author of our shared future?
In this hands-on workshop, artist, writer, and fermentation enthusiast Sean Roy Parker guided participants through traditional preservation methods using local produce to explore human relationships with wild microbes. Attendees transformed locally grown fruits and vegetables into probiotic foods like sauerkraut, fermented salsa, and cheong using basic household equipment. Alongside practical fermentation, Parker shared poems from his collection stewarding and led the group through writing a collaborative text on interspecies intimacy, expanding their sensory vocabulary and reflecting on the bodily experience of sharing food and the lifecycles of edible plants.
We are proud of our collaborations in 2026. Thanks to, among others TestTafel, Bureau Marineterrein, Expeditie Oosterdok, Rederij Lampedusa, 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, Gemeente Amsterdam, Arcam, The Snifferoo,Tomoko Foundation, Vrije Universiteit, Bureau Broedplaatsen, Mediacollege, TBA 21 and Ocean Space, WUR, OBA, Schietbaan, NatureOptimist, and Zoönomisch Instituut for the great collaborations and support!
