Landscape Breathing, Soil Sensing, and Spirit Offerings

A Collective Ritual

Developed through my work at Strand LAB, this research explores how urban landscapes might be encountered as living relational fields rather than passive environments. Working with the specific context of Almere, a city formed through land reclamation, the project asks how humans can re enter reciprocal relationships with land, soil, and more than human life.

Through collective workshops, participants engage in sensory walking, drawing, gathering, and deep mapping. These practices function as artistic research tools that cultivate attentiveness, relational awareness, and shared perception. Drawing is used not as representation, but as an instrument for sensing and translating encounter.

The resulting maps remain open and layered, allowing multiple stories, materials, and presences to coexist. In this way, ritual becomes a contemporary method for learning how to belong within a living landscape.

Rewilding Tasting

My artistic research unfolds in Oostvaardersplassen, a newly formed landscape where ecological systems have emerged through processes of land reclamation and natural succession. Here, I investigate how webs of alliance between human and more-than-human actors might be restored, re-sensed, and reimagined.

This project brings indigenous knowledge, ancient ecological wisdom, and contemporary scientific thought into dialogue as parallel ways of knowing. Through methods such as deep mapping informed by actor network theory, sustained observation, and embodied attunement to local ecologies, I approach landscape as a relational field rather than a static site.

Tending the Threshold

A situated practice of drawing and chanting that asks what it means to arrive at a place, and to keep arriving. It grows from sembah, an Indonesian quality of relational presence in which adoration, offering, and ritual are held as one. Through extended drawing, bioacoustic notation, and deep mapping, it attends to a shore and its more-than-human life as kin, staying with ecological loss rather than turning away. At its centre is a question: how can attending to water, across many grounds, grow a sense of belonging that reckons honestly with ecological loss and helps to decolonise how we belong to land?