Artist in Residence (AIR) ATD 2025
Climate Imaginaries: Artistic Research for Regenerative Futures with Land and Water
The ATD AIR 2025 hosts two parallel artistic research studios investigating the question of the role of art and imagination in responding to climate crisis with a focus on imagining possible future worlds where we relate land and water in more regenerative, less extractive ways.
Building on the method established by the Climate Imaginaries research project, this AIR invites an artist-in-residence to play a leading role in each studio - but places the emphasis on transdisciplinary, collective research, where the artist-in-residence works together with students, teachers, communities, societal partners and researchers from other disciplines such as climate scientists.
The two artistic research studios are:
The Power of Water
The Power of Water led by Dorothy Blokland. This studio will explore how artists, philosophers, children’s museums and climate researchers can come together to empower participants - particularly young people - to creatively investigate the relationship between oceanic climate change and colonialism with a focus on the relationship between the Netherlands and Suriname. Informed by Ubuntu philosophy and Indigenous scholarship (Kimmerer 2013), the studio will offer workshops where ATD students will learn how to use spoken word and photography to imagine what the water in our local environment in Amsterdam can tell us about its pasts-presents and futures: including the transatlantic slave trade, sea level rise and the consequences of climate change. Students will learn how to use the arts to open a dialogue with kids about big world problems. Of particular relevance to students on the teachers programmes in Dance and Theatre, the studio will also offer methods for engaging children and young people in climate justice through the arts in ways that inspire hope rather than fear.
“One of the most worrying and threatening consequences of climate change in Suriname is sea level rise. Surinamese who live and work in the low-lying coastal area are at greatest risk… Just as water connects us all, through the results of this intercultural and generational dialogue, I want to promote climate change awareness not only among young people, but among everyone who comes into contact with the stories. This is how The Power of Water was created”. - Dorothy Blokland
Singing a new land into being
Agat Sharma 'Early Warning System' - work in progress 2024
Singing a new land into being led by Agat Sharma investigating a collective reimagining of land-body relations through collective dreaming, improvised singing, and creating poetic/speculative digital landscapes informed by the cotton crisis in India and the impact of extractive agrochemical farming. During workshops students will create a performance with song and digital landscapes based on a script provided by Sharma, using collective dreaming techniques and drawing practices as ways of imagining alternative landscapes. Working closely with IDlab, participants will also be taught to use digital tools to create the virtual landscapes that have been collectively imagined and perform the songs they have made as they walk through them. In order to further share his artistic research process, the artist will also offer reading groups during the studio and produce a publication.
“The cotton farming community in India is the witnessing the worst ever wave of suicides in human history as a result of complex social, economic and political factors. The farm therefore has become a dynamic space where the body of the farmer is continuously being reconfigured to maintain the extractive paradigm that benefits the extractive global supply chains.
The space between the body and the landscape in the farm is defined through inescapable and extractive norms which work in the interest of extractive agrochemical farming. It is impossible to imagine an intimacy with land without the mediation of the capitalist forces. The violent separation and alienation of the farmers body is a constriction of the imagination and at the same time something that plays out in material form on the farm itself. Creating space where radical imagination of body-land relationships can be enacted or to manifest new emancipatory body-land relationships can kick start the imagination machine that can help us escape the extractive paradigm of industrial farming”. - Agat Sharma
Activities
Running between January-July 2025, both studios will conduct three main activities:
- From January: artist-in-residence conducting a practice-based research trajectory at the ATD.
- In April: practical workshops for ATD (+ AHK) students to learn the artistic research methods of the artist-in-residence and explore how they could use them in their own practice.
- In June/early July: a final public sharing where the AIRs and participating students will share the outcomes of their studio with teachers, staff, researchers and a wider public.
Images: Agat Sharma, post-show talk Early Warning System (2024) ; Dorothy Blokland, The Power of Water workshops @Villa Zapakara, Suriname and @VoxPop, Amsterdam 2024
A decolonial approach to sustainability
The AIR with Dorothy Blokland and Agat Sharma addresses the need to bring a decolonial approach to sustainability into the education, research programme and wider research culture of the ATD; to advance understandings of artistic research; and to provide a model for transdisciplinary collective research which can be applied within cross-departmental curricula and projects in the Academy.
The AIR builds on the previous knowledge gained through the 2024 residency with Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, enabling us to deepen our collective understanding of how artistic inquiry can contribute to regeneration and decolonization and enable us to re-imagine our relationships to land, water and other non-human entities.
Aligned with the emerging vision of the ATD (as articulated in the Vision trajectory conducted in 2024), the AIR contributes to collective held question of how we can train performing arts professionals of the future to move beyond extractivist, exhausting, unjust and individualist paradigms in the arts, towards more regenerative, caring, equitable and collective ways of working. The AIR takes a decolonial approach - foregrounding non-Eurocentric perspectives, colonial histories, diaspora stories - connecting to the ongoing decoloniality trajectory led by Platform 2025. The AIR centres the topic of sustainability, responding to the call from the Sustainability Platform to bring greater visibility to the urgency of climate change within the ATD.
In terms of innovation, decolonial approaches to regeneration in the arts and education remain underrepresented. The field of regenerative design and education for instance is often dominated by white, Eurocentric and future-oriented perspectives which lack both a global awareness and a historical approach which helps us to understand the root causes of climate crisis in its relationship to the colonial past.
As artists, both Dorothy Blokland and Agat Sharma take a historically-informed and non-Eurocentric approach which has the potential not only to offer a novel perspective to students but to make an important contribution to the working field and knowledge domain. Both artists-in-residence are also innovators in their respective fields of practice.
Artist biographies
Dorothy Blokland (she/her) is a Netherlands-based Surinamese artist with an established reputation in theatre, spoken word, diaspora storytelling and creative producing. Rooted in Ubuntu philosophy which emphasises commonality across difference, Blokland’s work aims to connect people through stories with a particular focus on overlooked stories collected from the Netherlands, diaspora countries and former colonies. She has been developing her own ‘braiding’ methodology to co-creation which enables her to establish reciprocal relationships with diverse participants, communities and societal partners.
Agat Sharma (he/him) is an artist, educator and theatre maker. Agat is currently engaged in a long term research about the history of cotton conducting theatrical experiments exploring cotton's pre-colonial legacy, colonial extractivism and the ongoing agrarian crisis in India. His work prominently features themes examining the emergence, evolution and erasure of the relationship between land and the body. He works with an expanded notion of what a song and a story can be and employs them as tools for evoking post-colonial imaginaries. Agat works between the Netherlands and India. In the past his work has been associated with The Sarai Programme, Khoj Artist Association, Jawahar Kala Kendra, and Jan Natya Manch.
Events
This AIR programme addresses the need for critical reflection on sustainability from a decolonial perspective through a public programme where students, teachers and professionals can come together – across disciplines and institutions – in order to learn together about imagining more regenerative ways of relating to land, water and non-human life. This includes a range of public events and internal gatherings for the ATD/AHK community. Confirmed events:
17 January 2025 (internal event, by invitation) - Singing a new land into being @AvB Winter School Justice By Design, public sharing marking the end of the Winter School.
23 January 2025 -14:10 hrs. - 15:30 hrs. The Power of Water | Art as a Tool for Social Dialogue
@SPRONG: Imagination in Transitions symposium at Pakhuis de Zwijger.
Workshop + panel discussion
Contributors: Dorothy Blokland (artist-researcher, AHK / ATD Lectorate), Willemijn Voerman (Programmer, The Beach)
Moderator: Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca
In this workshop and panel discussion, artists, researchers and cultural partners will explore how art can be used to make complex global issues such as climate crisis accessible to children, and to create awareness among adults through children's perspectives. The session focusses on The Power of Water project which is an artistic research studio, situated at AHK, as part of the SPRONG verbeeldingswerkplatz, Climate Imaginaries. Led by AHK artist-researcher Dorothy Blokland, The Power of Water works in collaboration with The Beach and Villa Zapakara - the children’s museum in Suriname - to investigate how children in the Netherlands, Suriname and Curaçao can exchange their own climate stories with each other through photography and spoken word. The current phase of the project is particularly concerned with methods: working with partners to explore and exchange methods that combine spoken word with other artistic approaches to consider climate crisis with children. The session will combine discussion with practical interactive exercises.
More information & reservations
6 February 2025 14:00 hrs.-16:00 hrs. (internal event) - Regenerative Art Education meeting @DAS - the AIRs participate in a gathering of artistic leaders and teachers sharing best practices of existing attempts to apply regenerative principles to art education in the ATD.
February - June 2025 - ASCA Seminar Series - alongside the studios at AHK, the AIR will host a series of five, monthly public seminars at ASCA - the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis at University of Amsterdam as part of the Leerstoel of Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca. Guest speakers and dates tbc.
End of June / beginning July - End of studio sharings of both studios.
More about the AIR programme of the Amsterdam University of the Arts