Exhibition and Publication
with a Bird,
with a Bird,
A Reader on Avian Kinship
With contributions by John Berger, Ignace Cami, Monika Czyżyk, Bryony Dunne, Daniel Godínez Nivón, Daisy Hildyard, Manjot Kaur, Natalie Lawrence, Marianne Elisabeth Lien, Michelle J. Moyer, Evangeline M. Rose, Bernard Lohr, Karan J. Odom, Kevin E. Omland, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Ai Ozaki, Maria Popova, Sergio Rojas Chaves, Sara Sejin Chang (Sara van der Heide), Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Yuri Tuma, and Suzanne Walsh.
Edited by Marjolein van der Loo
With a Bird, A Reader on Avian Kinship, edited by Marjolein van der Loo, invites readers into an expansive, cross-disciplinary conversation about how we live with and think alongside birds. In a time of climate breakdown and ecological grief, this book offers birds not as metaphors or curiosities, but as kin-creatures with their own histories, desires, and forms of knowing.
Spanning speculative fiction, ancestral memory, critical ornithology, personal essay, and visual art, its contributions explore the fragile, often overlooked relationships between humans and birds across myth, science, migration, and dream. Through listening and attention, the book explores how birds shape landscapes, signal planetary change, and offer new ways of understanding time, voice, and relation.
Contributors draw on decolonial, feminist, and ecological practices to unsettle dominant narratives and invite forms of care, reciprocity, and repair. From the mimicry of the lyrebird to the silence of vanished species, from winter dreaming to co-domestication and spectral presence, each chapter gestures toward multispecies futures grounded in presence and poetic attention. This reader, both a continuation of an exhibition and a gathering of distinct voices, becomes a spell — woven from memory, sound, and image — that reimagines kinship in flight.
The exhibition with a Bird, commissioned by Onomatopee, explores birds as visionaries, inspiring humans in both scientific and spiritual understandings of life. Birds are among the species most admired by humans, from their ability to fly to their navigational skills and song. They have been extensively observed, studied, and featured in many folktales. The human aspiration to become bird-like and acquire their qualities has influenced both scientific advancements and spiritual belief systems.
With a Bird, showcases research and artworks where artists explore how birds challenge and transgress categories such as human and non-human life, dream and reality, death and life, science, and folklore, as well as the realms of land, water, and sky.
With works by:
Daniel Godínez Nivón, Ignace Cami, Bryony Dunne, Ai Ozaki, Sergio Rojas Chaves, Monika Czyżyk, Manjot Kaur and Sara Sejin Chang (Sara van der Heide).
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Monika Czyżyk, Belly Full of Worms
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exhibition view
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Ignace Cami, Gaai
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exhibition view
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Ignace Cami, I'll explain everything to the geese
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exhibition view
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listening station
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Ignace Cami, I'll explain everything to the geese (detail)
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exhibition view
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Sergio Rojas Chaves, Tools for Bird Hospitality
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Sergio Rojas Chaves, Tools for Bird Hospitality
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Daniel Godínez Nivón, Dreamwind
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Manjot Kaur, Hybrid Being I (detail)
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Monika Czyżyk, Belly Full of Worms
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Ignace Cami, I'll explain everything to the geese
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Monika Czyżyk, Belly Full of Worms (detail)
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Bryony Dunne, Killing the Messengers
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Ai Ozaki, Fountain
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Manjot Kaur, Hybrid Being I
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Sara Sejing Chang (Sara van der Heide), The Spirit
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Monika Czyżyk, Belly Full of Worms
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exhibition view
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Ai Ozaki, Fountain
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Sergio Rojas Chaves, Tools for Bird Hospitality
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exhibition view
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Bryony Dunne, Killing the Messengers
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exhibition detail
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design by Yannick Nuss
Birding Excursion
& Zine Making
This zine is the result of a two-part gathering that brought together bird enthusiast artists and researchers for a shared inquiry into the ecological and poetic life of wetlands. Initiated in the unique landscape of National Park De Biesbosch, the project began with an evening birding excursion on April 12, guided by birder Arjan Loeve and researcher, curator, and educator Margarida Mendes. At dusk, binoculars and careful listening helped us tune into the rhythms of migratory birds and the layered ecologies of the wetland.
Margarida, drawing from her ongoing work on wetlands, opened a space for reflection on biodiversity, carbon memory, and the affective qualities of transitional landscapes. These impressions became the seeds for the zine.
The excursion and this publication are part of with a Bird, an exhibition (11-01/27-04) and research program that explores how we relate to birds—through observation, imagination, folklore, science, and care. The program highlights how birds move across boundaries: between land, water, and sky, between the human and non-human, and between the real and the imaginative.
In the weeks following the excursion, participants developed contributions in response to their experience—visuals, texts, traces—culminating in a collective risograph workshop at Onomatopee. With support from the riso team, we printed and assembled our materials into this edition.
The pages that follow are not a documentation, but a continuation. A small ecosystem of voices, textures, and sightings—each shaped by the act of looking, listening, and responding in and with the landscape.
Contributions by: Sol Archer, Nick Bookelaar, Margarida Mendes, Yannick Nuss, Marjolein van der Loo, Arjan Loeve, Thijs Vleeschouwer, Miles Worner
Exhibition and publicationA Tree,
To what extent is anthropomorphism a way to strengthen the connection between humans and trees, or an anthropocentric danger that makes it impossible to acquire objective knowledge? Exhibition A Tree, showcases research and works where artists explore the relationship between people and trees and ways in which we can relate more closely to their time span.
A Tree,
A Reader on Arboreal Kinship
With contributions by Joss Allen, Céline Baumann, Bárbara Sánchez Barroso, Jorge Menna Barreto, Renée Bus, Lucy Davis, Amirio Freeman, Manjot Kaur, Karen Lofgren, Anne Richter, Jerrold Saija, Oscar Salguero, Jonmar van Vlijmen, Müge Yilmaz, Gerbrand Burger, Chihiro Geuzenbroek, Femke Habets, Roderick Hietbrink, Ingela Ihrman, Mari Keski-Korsu, Alice Ladenburg, Hira Nabi, Frank Resseler, Sanne Vaassen.
Edited by Marjolein van der LooA Tree, is about vegetal agency, plant knowledge, and the interaction between plants and people, with a specific focus on trees. Like all plants, trees make the world; they literally create soil, shape landscapes, and affect the climate. They produce oxygen. They provide fuel, food, building materials, and shelter, and form ecologies where a myriad of species come together to enter into various symbiotic partnerships. Trees are wonderful to think with, and humans have been doing so—through meditation, in all kinds of storytelling, and as partners in problem-solving—probably for as long as they have walked the earth. Trees are also time tellers, rather than following industrial time, clock time, or any time defined by human activity, trees relate to their own experience of time.
Through this reader, the aim is to nurture and encourage dialogues and to share inspiration on exercising arboreal kinship by taking the time to think about trees differently through imagination, art, music, storytelling, poetry, and images. Moreover, the contributions in A Tree, inspire us to move beyond large systems of oppression and towards exorcizing anthropocentrism, capitalism, individualism, heteronormativity, and coloniality, by learning from and with tree time.
A Tree,
exhibition
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Onomatopee
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Gerband Burger, Models for Deep Storage
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Roderick Hietbrink, The Living Room
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Further Reading
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Bookshop
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Manjot Kaur, Tree in a Jharokha
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Sanne Vaassen, Fractals
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Ingela Ihrman, The Wandering Spruce
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Alice Ladenburg & Ollie Palmer, Trees of Rotterdam
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Goldin+Senneby, Spruce Time
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Hira Nabi, How to Love a Tree
THREE BECOMES
TWO BECOMES
ONE BECOMES
NONE
Editor for an eco-feminist gathering of stories on the Mandrake and European witch-hunts by artist Leonie Brandner.
Published by Onomatopee, October 2024. This is the story of one plant growing on the soil of the human mind. It is a story that started with a physical plant, yet transformed and warped over the course of 5000 years of human history into something utterly otherworldly. It is a story of life and death, lust and jealousy, greediness and anxiety; it is the story of the Mandragora.
The Mediterranean-growing Mandragora is a medicinal plant and one of the best-recorded gynecological herbal substances across history. In Ancient Greece, it was used as an aphrodisiac, a sleeping aid, and as a narcotic in surgeries to induce labor and expel stillbirths. But the Mandragora is more than simply medicinal – the herb is mysteriously depicted as half-human-half-plant. The stories that emerged around the enigmatic human plant grew into a potent fairy tale and even a belief system known as the ‘Alraunglaube’. The belief stimulated a flourishing counterfeit trade, became the grounds for numerous witch trials, and was most potent where the plant itself never even grew: in Northern Europe. But by the start of the 19th century, the plant's knowledge and story suddenly vanished into obscurity.
The book Katsura Hito orbits around the Katsura tree. This tree is an elemental spirit of the Japanese landscape in the fall season. As the transformation of the Katsura’s colored leaves and their enchanting sweet scent changes the sensorial experience of their environment, they remind us of our connection to the seasons. The tree’s embeddedness in Japanese folklore and traditional storytelling leads us to a yokai supernatural spirit, legend, and gardener: Katsura-Otoko, or, in Chinese; Wu Gang. His efforts in pruning the Katsura tree on the moon to cause lunar cycles connects cosmology to ecology as a natural part of our earthly existence. The story’s premise serves as an inspiration and starting point for this project.
This publication introduces the Katsura tree as a point of departure from which to map a rich ecology of relations and experiences with materials (recipes, exercises, and images) that accompany stories—fictional and “factual”—of a multi-sensorial experience of the fall season.
The writing questions modern/colonial binaries like east and west, nature and culture, fact and fiction, higher and lower senses, and the human and non-human. It calls readers to not only exercise awareness of their environments but to imagine along with them.
During two residency periods in the winter of 2021 and 2022 at ARCUS Project in Ibaraki, Japan, one online and one on location, I worked on the project and produced the book designed by Yannick Nuss.
KATSURA HITO
KATSURA HITO is sold out and will soon go to re-print
The Far Side of Paper, Recomposed
Solo exhibition by An Onghena
at KIKA Gallyer, Kyoto (JP)
The Far Side of Paper, Recomposed, is part of the project Book&Space, a collaboration between Limestone Books Maastricht (NL) and KIKA Gallery Kyoto (JP) initiated by Marjolein van der Loo.
Book&Space offers an exhibition opportunity in Kyoto for artists/bookmakers in the Maastricht border region, including Aachen, Liege, and Hasselt (NL, DE, BE).
Book & Space takes the artist’s book as a starting point and wants to investigate how a book can relate to space by activating the KIKA Gallery with an exhibition.
An Onghena was selected by a professional jury in the Netherlands and Japan through an Open Call in the Autumn of 2023.
Co-Editor with Kristiina Koskentola
Contributions by: Mi Yu, Rick Dolphijn, Müge Yilmaz, Taru Elfving and others
170 mm x 240 mm, 176 Pages
1st Edition: 500 copies, 2nd Edition 1200 copies
Publishing by Onomatopee
Design by Yannick NussPractitioners from diverse fields across Eurasia, from North, South, and West to East Asia and back, gather to explore multidisciplinary ecologies and non-anthropocentric and embodied approaches to collaboration. Through art and dialogue, installations, film, audio, performative, and textual works, we delve into interdependencies of entities and beings and interdisciplinary perspectives to imagine the active and implicated role of humans in complex ecologies.
Enfleshed -
Ecologies of Entities and Beings
Curator in Residence @ Zero Foundation, Düsseldorf
Sept-Dec 2023
Research on the work of Nanda Vigo through the lens of science fiction
curator in residence at the Zero Foundation in Düsseldorf
Artists in the ZERO group base their work on a socio-political awareness of their time and respond to their artistic context and societal reality in radical ways. As mentioned in their manifest, subjects like light, future, and essentialism are central aspects of their thinking. Nanda Vigo’s practice, ideas, and interests fit and add to the collective. Still, she stood out as one of the few women in the Zero group and as a very articulated and active member between 1964 and 1966. Moreover, she fought the categorizations of gender and those of the disciplines of designer, architect, and artist; Vigo claimed to work harder for success than their male colleagues.
In the early ’60s, Vigo wrote the ‘Manifesto Cronotopico,’ describing her ideas about transformation by light and access to a 5th dimension, which they named “a-dimension.” Many of their sculptures and spatial installations embody the ideas in this manifest, activating the chromatic waves in the visible spectrum as gateways to other dimensions of space and time.
Vigo saw a parallel between her work and science fiction. A genre that I particularly appreciate for its ability to speculate and experiment with social and environmental futures. Science fiction can be an ally for the revolt of subversive social classes. Recognition and alienation have a dialectic exchange with each other within the genre. It can force a confrontation with ideas and conventions that seem natural and logical or inescapable in a world based on different premises or conditions. A critical understanding of the underlying structures that create the known and daily life can emerge through this dialectical interaction between the known and the alien.
Through zine making, I have worked through Nanda Vigo’s artistic thinking in the 60ties, with theories of light as a starting point. In the second zine, I have contextualized the aspects of the Italian fascistic regime and “Stunden null” for the ZERO collective in the work and life of the artist. In the third and last zine, strands of cinema, science fiction, othering, and spirituality come together, centralizing Star Trek (TOS) and her favorite spaceship, The Enterprise.
Made possible by Zero Foundation and Mondriaan Fund
KATSURA HITO
Artist Residency @ARCUS Project, Ibaraki, Japan
Sept-Dec 2022Katsura Hito orbits around the Katsura tree. This tree is an elemental spirit of the Japanese landscape in the fall season. As the transformation of Katsura’s colored leaves and their enchanting sweet smell changes the sensorial experience of the environment, they remind us of our connection to the seasons. Its embeddedness in Japanese folklore and traditional storytelling leads us to a yokai supernatural spirit, legend, and gardener: Katsura-Otoko or in Chinese; Wu Gang. His efforts in pruning the Katsura tree on the moon to cause lunar cycles connect cosmology to ecology as a natural part of our earthly existence. The story’s premise serves as an inspiration and starting point for this project.
During the online artist residency in the winter of 2021-2022, I started the research with a small Katsura tree in my garden and collected many different perspectives on the tree. For the onsite residency during the fall of 2022, with the possibility to carry out local research, I decided to follow a selection of strands I had gathered before. By visiting the places and meeting the humans and non-humans I had the ability to dive deeper into the stories, collect materials, and undergo experiences and adventures, becoming part of the self-constructed ecology of the Katsura tree.
To process these experiences I have used a travel and dream diary method as a starting point to create texts that move between historical analysis and multi-sensorial observations and welcome imagination and surreal interpretations. A risographed volume combines the writing with illustrations, exercises, recipes, and an interview with Aizen Katsura.
Graphic design by Yannick Nuss
Printing and Publishing by Hand Saw Press
Photo by Kawashima Ayami
Book launch March 22nd 2023, 19:00-22:00
at Limestone Books, Grote Gracht 63, Maastricht
Lecturer @ Academy of Arts Maastricht
Lecturer research skills for the Communication and Multimedia Design minor 'The Narrative'
Developing and teaching courses in Art Education for the minors
'Sensorial Learning'
'Identity and Emancipation'
'Futures and Imagination'
'Multi-species Communities'
Residency @Somalgors74
During a two-week residency at Somalgors in Switzerland, I got fascinated by the local birds and how they create their habitat in local landscapes. A specific interest developed for the Tannenhäher (or nutcracker), a jay related to the crow family, which has a symbiotic relationship with the Swiss Arolla pine. Within this relationship of mutual dependency, the bird collects and plants the pine nuts produced by the tree. Part of the nuts serve as provision, others will form new trees in the future, creating and maintaining ecologies at high altitudes.
The Tannanhäher has thus become a starting point for thinking around the concept of worlding, a generative process that blurs the discrimination between the subject and their environment. Thinking with the work of Daniel Godines Nivon my (to be written) essay wonders and wanders around the role of imagination and dreams experienced by birds in this process of worlding.
Radical care & Feminist Practices
Aug 17 - 18
Re-Assembling Motherhoods is an exhibition, book presentation, and two-day riso workshop with an opening event by two members of the collective Maternal Fantasies @Onomatopee.
Education for Observatorium
@DeDomijnen
Observatorium is an artwork that Stefan Cools made for Museum De Domijnen Contemporary Art. It is a mobile station for field research and on-site landscape management.
I have developed an educational program and activities that activate Observatorium when it visits local sites and events like schools, farmer's markets, theater festivals, or preservation clubs, ranging from short games to afternoon activities and campfire sessions. Equipped to introduce and determine common lichen species, re-appreciate common weeds by botanical observation and play a round of bird-bingo, the fully-loaded field-work-cargo bike invites audiences of all ages and expertise levels to engage with a rich but pressured environment.
Coach
@The Known Artist
Het beeldende kunst platform The known Artist is een talentontwikkelingstraject voor jonge kunstenaars. 5 deelnemers worden binnen het traject door coaches en experts begeleid in hun professionele ontwikkeling
Shallow Waters - Exhibition and Event
Shallow Waters is a presentation that explores two extreme cases of urbanized shallow water territories – Markermeer/IJsselmeer in the heart of the Netherlands and the Venetian Lagoon. This presentation derives from the publication Shallow Waters.
During the performative book launch, ideas and experiences that emerged from the research for the publication were shared. This included encounters with freshwater microorganisms by live projection through the lens of Wim van Egmond’s microscope. Dr. Harm van der Geest (IBED – UvA) and Alice Smits (Zone2Source) had an animated conversation on multispecies empathy with project initiator and editor Lada Hršak and her Bureau LADA colleague architect Ludovica Beltrami. Artist collective De Onkruidenier looked at the relationship between ecologies and economies and shared a tasting of a foam landscape in their performance titled CryptoFoam.
In Notes on Nutmeg, I think and experience with a non-human protagonist, the nutmeg. The video functions as an introduction to my curatorial practice as a framework for storytelling, sensorial observation, and research.
The video builds a visual and verbal narrative that deconstructs the impacts of Dutch colonialism organized around the nutmeg as both object and agent.
Inspired by ecofeminist thinkers, like Donna Haraway and Ursula K. le Guin, I explore embodied ways of knowing to create space for learning and critical reflection.
Notes on Nutmeg
SHAPE
SHAPE is an online tool that maps the rich variety of Art Events and Initiatives in the city of Helsinki.
As a curatorial assistant at PUBLICS, I worked on gathering and selecting the content and the implementation of this online map.
SHAPE is a project initiated by PUBLICS and Kohta Kunsthalle.
Storytelling Festival
Once Upon A Town
As the curator of the 2019 edition of the Bureau Europea initiated Storytelling Festival “Once Upon A Town,” held in Maastricht, I developed a program of exhibitions, workshops, lectures, and dinners paired with stories around the theme of migration. I paid particular attention to inclusivity, diversity, as well as sensitivity in my curatorial process.
The festival similarly addressed a diverse audience and brought people together who may not ordinarily share space in the city.
Lunar Calendar
In the Project Lunar Calendar, I have developed a calendar that connects biodynamic farming to artistic practice as part of the Alternative Education programme at Rupert, Vilnius, Lithuania. I was inspired by the biodynamic approach to agriculture that includes spiritual concerns toward the earth, and all actors in the ecological system and the integration of cosmological forces. The project aims to connect cultural producers to rhythms of nature and cosmos and invites them to reflect on wellbeing and work ethics.
The calendar is designed and printed double-sided on A1 format.