In collaboration with Land Art Flevoland

Mentor: Megan Hoetger

Public Programme:
4&5 June, 11-17h
at Polderland Garden of Love and Fire (Almere)
during Land Art Weekend 2022

Eloy Cruz del Prado (1992, Madrid) works between the roles of resistance and self-reliance in the development of intimacy, sexuality, care, and love. His research focuses on these tools in the creation of non-normative identities allowing for the growth of new social imaginings and defiance. In del Prado’s performance and installation works, social belonging is unraveled through an emotional and political lens, while tradition, as a strategy for the settlement of social structures, and memory, as a malleable object, are present as important agents in this process.

Social and intimate gestures are abstracted, becoming actors for the destabilization of normative structures. Recall rural roots, to auto-fiction stories that reflect on an understanding of intimacy. Currently, the approach to this concept is questioned through a lens where recognition through labor shapes the insight of care, sexuality, or love. With this comes an idea of success within a capitalist frame, that influences social behavior and the artist itself.

The forms that this theory takes are installation and performances, where a selection of materials and elements like sound, lighting, and text, are dissociated in order to create a composition capable of suggesting different layers depending on the eyes of the viewer.

Liza Houben is an interdisciplinary Dutch artist who creates hybrid installation work that revolves around the themes of feminist sci-fi, reproduction, transitions and transhumanism. Her works are monumental handmade fragile sculptures and durational performances. In her work Houben connects a “strong” element or an element that according to the stereotype of masculinity is associated with the woman. Her works contain cold, metal and organic forms. When Houben develop new sculptures, she fuses organic forms with abstract elemental forms, referring to the original function as well as to a new function of those forms. The sculpture thus transforms into its future function.

“With my hybrid performance installations I always envision future female sci-fi worlds in which we could live. They are eternally and rapidly changing landscapes, constructed by Mother Nature in symbiosis with technology. Cities, where eggs are currency and artificial forests that function as disconnected wombs. Where specific feminine qualities are democratized or obtainable from a vending machine. Where we can move as fluid consciousness in all matter; where persons, souls or materials have their own agency to transform or mix with living materials. Where we can explore the limits of our queer bodies by redefining and updating them. In the installations I create a world that is no longer limited by female stereotypes and social norms. Join me on an utopian quest based on spiritual and feminine thinking. In June 2021 I played with my piece called Lake at Holland Festival in De Brakke grond in Amsterdam. During my residency period at AM in Almere I will work on my new landscape called Blossom.”

Mica Pan was born in 1994 in Xiamen, China. She had classical drawing training and graduated in 2016 from the Animation program at the Communication University of China (CUC), Beijing. She went on to study in Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam at the Fine Arts department (graduating cum laude in 2021), and since that time performance has become the main focus of her practice.

She is interested in the subconscious, the idea of “nothingness” in contrast with “something ness”. As a site-specific performance artist, different structures of architecture and spaces often serve as a material and starting point for her idea to manifest into a form, while everyday actions and objects often appear as a medium to merge with space in a minimalistic way. She aims to create a subtle intersection of narrative and feeling/ sensation in space, allowing the audience to enter a realm where they can get in touch with the subconscious in an immersive atmosphere – and still be aware of the present. During her performance, she sees herself and the audience as equal participants, and creates a space where private and public, conceptualized and undefined, meet.

In collaboration with Exhibition for one day (Corrosia)

Mentor: Onkruidenier

Public Programme:
9 July, 12-17h
at the square in front of Corrosia,
Markt 43, Almere Haven

“My work begins with the process of picking up and collecting some unrecognized traces of life in the great narrative and the accumulation of time – and pays attention to the moment when these little and trivial traces come together and manifest themselves. Those moments are beautiful, but also delicate, anxious, and accurate. I believe it provides a ground for solidarity. I search for some actions and methods to amplify these moments.” Miru Bahc (Seoul)

Eva van der Zand (1989, Nijmegen) was born on the border between the Netherlands and Germany. Growing up in this area made her question; “How do stories
shape our identity?” With her work she aims to encourage us to rethink our relation to our surroundings, objects and materials, and how our perspective on identity is shaped by (fragile) stories. She notices that fragility is ingrained in our daily lives, this is what attracted her to work predominantly with glass as a material. This element of fragility she uses as a focus to tell stories.

After completing her study International Relations at the Rijks University of Groningen and TUKS university in South Africa, she started as a journalist, guide, media specialist and teacher for various organizations. These experiences contributed to her research on the relation between language and the material world. She wondered: “How does our voice and breath shape our bodies and the (material) world around us?” In her practice she works a lot with embodied knowledge and linguistics, with the confronting and comforting aspects of it, Co(n)mf(r)orting. These concepts come together in her graduation work of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Botanical Milk Bar. During her studies she specialized in glass blowing, and in her practice she brings together food, art and science.

Next to her artistic practice she started an artistic research hub on the border named “The Moraine”. Here she offers place for artists and designers to come for an artist in residency and develops workshops, educational programs and exhibitions.

In collaboration with M.

Jerrold Saija focuses on unlearning cycles of harm caused by colonial history and its impact on the Moluccan body. In his artistic practice he resources from grief, oral history, lived experience, archives, memory and pleasures of the Moluccan body. He navigates new possibilities within and around what remains. Clowning, photography, sculpting, 3D modelling, rendering & printing, as well as storytelling are used as tools to reconnect with what has been lost. Objects and installations re-emerge, becoming ancestral communication & healing technologies.

Mayis Rukel is a multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker and writer. Rukel’s works are moves towards healing and liberation from the continuous destruction of the(neo)colonial and supremacist structures and systems that dominate and harm the earth. Through the power of humor and vulnerability, Rukel creates narratives in image and performance; imagining a different world into reality with an interconnected web of right and transforming relationships between humans, non- human kin and the earth. With a background in literature and philosophy, Rukel graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, VAV/Moving Image department in 2020 and is currently researching embodied social justice in his practice at theSandberg Institute master’s program Ecologies of Transformation (2021-2023), led by Camille Barton.

In collaboration with StrandLAB

Our name is notjohn, the nobody, the zeros, a collective who is there but at the same time is not. notjohn focuses on what it means to inhabit space, considering all the exclusive and inclusive properties of making something your own. The characteristics of their works are that they seem unfinished, are changing and keep on stretching the boundaries of ‘a work’. To encapsulate other people’s works, or by changing a public space with a noisy instrument is where their attempts to trespass boundaries occur.

For notjohn to be able to be in motion and to stay connected to others, thresholds and borders are to be bypassed. In their artistic practice they are exploring the distance and proximity in relationships they have with others.This research takes place by building works that aim to reevaluate the position one takes. By using apparatuses that take or give control the feedback system of a shared space is measured.

Our world is antagonistic yet constructive. Building constructive tools to question a status quo is what we are busying ourselves with. These inventions come out of a determination towards the goal of transcending one’s own limitations in a trust fall with their environment.

According to Sanne van Balen, language is the instrument humans use to make sense of the world.

“In my view it’s an important instrument in finding grip. I am a writer and visual artist that works from a personal fascination for how language works and how language takes shape in more than just ‘text’. I prefer to work outside and figure out how daily reality meets imagination. Lately I see in my paintings something emerging that wants to get out of something and something that is simultaneously locked up by the very same thing [itself]. Paint becomes earth’s crust. The water level is rising. Everything swirls. Through my performative installations with paintings, textiles and stories I look for meaning and ways to ‘hold on’.”

Joana Velu (1993, Dutch/Brazilian) constantly zooms in and out from a global context to a micro scale. Through personal stories or other forms of narrative, she intends to let herself and others experience abstract, social, political or economical structures on a more tactile, personal level. Whether she follows her own roots and cassava’s route of colonialism, slavery and trade, or explore the thin line between reality and fiction through a filmed portrait of her grandmother, her work is always characterised by extensive research. Also interaction, dialogue and or collaboration with other people play an important role in her work, whether it concerns the making process or the presentation form. The use of material ranges from film, ceramics, photography, writing, drawing and (lecture) performances.