Artists Lotte Geeven & Yeb Wiersma put an unusual experiment to the test: The creation of ‘Diffusion, Essence de Rabot’. For this artwork 100 participants will take part in the making of an ‘essence’ in the Rabot neighborhood (Ghent, Belgium) during one day on October 6th, 2017. They will be asked to wear a clean white T-shirt that will capture traces of their emotions in the form of signal molecules. The body’s alchemy produces these molecules to communicate emotions with others. (Video still, Lotte Geeven & Yeb Wiersma, 2017)

How do tangible and invisible matter shape our perceptions and representations of the world around us? During this expedition we’ll probe how the production of knowledge through materiality, art and science, and the natural world are entangled in a close embrace. With graphic designer Dongyoung Lee who dove into the basement of the Artis Library, where a shadow collection lies hidden in the dark. With historian Leonor Jonker on her grandmother’s colonial objects such as snake leggings from Zimbabwe, with astrophysicist Sera Markoff  on the palpable life of black holes. Finalizing with Michael Moore on bass clarinet treating us to his instant interpretation of ‘Deep Things Out of Darkness’. (Graphics: Dongyoung Lee)

In honor of Robert Filliou’s ‘La Musée Légitime’ visual artist Martin La Roche Contreras curates a series of performative exhibitions inside a hat. For the edition at Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo the artist infused the interior of a Coppola hat with an essence consisting of the ground seeds of the Snuff Box Sea Bean, rectified spirit and seawater. The thick seeds are employed in various native medicinal traditions to induce vivid, lucid dreams or communication with the spirits.
(Image: Yeb Wiersma)

Interview on Yeb Wiersma’s art practice in O, Wonder Magazine dedicated to Green Culture and inspired by Felix Guattari’s Manifesto on Ecosophy. (Download interview here.) 

The Great Spin (sketch proposal for City of Utrecht, Leidse Rijn) is an interactive project looking into the dynamics of objects in motion, migration and play. By exploring the possibilities to let a ball, equipped with a GPS tracker, bounce and spin by people in orbit around the earth’s surface. (Image: Ball departing from the Permanent Court of Arbitration, Peace Palace, The Hague, NL, Yeb Wiersma)

During the 5th expedition we look at how the natural world is domesticated? In what kind of homes do animals dwell? And is our own body a home that we inhabit? With Zoo- and landscape architect Thijs de Zeeuw, comparative psychologist Mariska Kret who’ll introduce us to the emotional world of great apes, and talk about love narratives and the bodies we dwell in with philosopher Margriet van Heesch of the University of Amsterdam.

The upcoming expedition is dedicated to exploring the topics of extinction, preservation, the value systems and appropriated language we attribute to natural objects. Ecologist Joris Buis will introduce to us the threat we are facing of the ‘6th mass extinction event’. In case of extinction, what exactly is lost? What are the consequences of this loss? Design researcher Femke Herregraven will lead us through the game of speculation in nature, and visual artists Oscar Santillan and Vibeke Mascini will attempt to bring back an extinct word to life. Finally, CITES Officer Anton Huitema will speak about the enforcement of illegal trade in the port of Rotterdam. (Image: videostill from Cargo by Elisa Grasso & Yeb Wiersma, 2017)

How do humans and animals move through their environment on journeys of migration and flight? How do they navigate both their path and their resources, adapting to new circumstances? What role do material culture and environment play in shaping or sustaining identities in these precarious situations? The third expedition of ‘This Teeming World’ is dedicated to exploring migration and environment, and the strategies and modes of adaptation in identity, culture and environment. With London based singer/songwriter Sam Lee, Syrian photographer Omar Imam and ecologist Wouter Vansteenlant specialized in Bird Movement Analyses. (Image: Yeb Wiersma, 2016)

Invitation by Artceb Botopasi located in the Maroon village of Botopasi in the Amazon interior of Surinam. Learning from the residents about today’s ethnobotanical use of plants, survival gardening methods, rhythmic traditions and how these have been affected and influenced by its nomadic, enslaved and colonial past. (Image: Yeb Wiersma)