Here you can watch the full recording, or parts of the event, like the introduction by Joyce van den Berg, Wilko Koning's Presentation or Toby Kiers' presentation. The break-out session and discussion at the end are included in the full recording.
Article: Delta City Amsterdam, the Annexed Areas and Water Management
Amsterdam has a long tradition in 'handling water'. This is already implied in the origin of the name: a Dam was built in the Amstel to establish a trade center at the meeting point of the river and the sea (the IJ was in open connection with the Zuiderzee). It is remarkable that such a location clearly entailed risks. Foreigners are often surprised by this: why would you live on the waterline, or in the case of the surrounding polders even below it? The same kind of question can be asked of people who live at the foot of a volcano. Apparently, the fertility of the soil there outweighs the risks of a volcanic eruption.
Visual artist Jaehun Park was commissioned by the municipality of Amsterdam to create a work of art inspired by the Academic Workshop Soil. His artistic research simultaneously serves as inspiration and stimulation to arrive at new insights, perspectives and practices around soil in the city, which is the aim of the Academic Workshop Soil. Following the first meeting on SCALE, a few impressions of the artwork in the making are shown below.
About Jaehun Park
Jaehun Park’s virtual works deal with current problematic events on Earth by zooming in on cleverly chosen metaphors and objects. In his simulated video works, he translates physical substance using 3D scanning technology into virtual substance, such as polygon structures and point cloud systems (a set of data points in space). He uses hyper-realistic 3D rendering to stage mass-produced objects – as vessels of capitalistic ideology – in an abandoned digital space or to situate them in ‘ritualistic’ installations depicting impossible natural phenomena. The different kinds of staged objects depict dark Korean histories, but also violent histories of the entire human race. Moreover, these by-products of a hyper-capitalistic, machine-driven civilization and symbols of war unfold in a virtual hellscape – a place inhabited by ready-made 3D digital objects as well as instruments of torture and tortured humans. A seemingly unreal landscape; perhaps closer to the reality of our time than we wish to believe.
Park doesn’t shy away from anything in his work. With his simulation algorithms, manipulated and staged virtual landscapes, and installations, he reveals the tip of the real world – oversaturated by hideous and glorious moments of capitalism. Desire, vanity, guilt, irrationality, and indebtedness become resources in the ‘ritual’ space of capitalism. The concept of hell doesn’t manifest itself after death, but here in this hellish reality.
Jaehun Park (1986, South Korea) lives and works in Amsterdam and Seoul. Graduated from the Department of Painting (BFA, MFA) at Seoul National University and Master Artistic Research at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague. Recent exhibitions include Topographic Atlas, JAN Museum, Amstelveen (2022), Art and Peace: Let us begin again from zero o’clock, Ulsan Art Museum, Ulsan (2022), Alternative Space Loop Seoul (2021), Sign Project Space Groningen (2021), Photo Basel (2021), Unseen Amsterdam (2021), Project Space 1646 The Hague (2019), and Artspace O Seoul (2016). His work is part of several collections including Amstelveen Municipal Art Collection, Normec, The Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture, Korea Institute for Advanced Study and the Seoul National University Health Service Center.
Toby Kiers's goal is to understand how symbiotic partnerships form between plants, animals and microbes, and what causes these partnerships to break down. Kiers has shown how plant roots and fungi form complex underground trade networks in which -- similar to human markets -- poor partners are punished and high-performing partners are rewarded. Kiers develops techniques in which she forces organisms to cheat and then tests how their partners respond. She discovered key mechanisms by which plant hosts can evaluate and control microbial communities on their roots. This has led to a better understanding of how hosts can actively manipulate their microbiomes.
Kiers received her PhD from University of California, Davis and is now a Professor of Evolutionary Biology at the VU Amsterdam in the Netherlands. She has conducted research in Central America, Africa, Asia, Europe and North America, and she is active in global agricultural policy and conservation efforts.