Research residency for artistic non-human studies co-funded by Buitenplaats Brienenoord and the participants, the participation fee is €70. The residency is designed and hosted by artists Alexander Brouwer, Lisa Zakharova and Marieke Stein.

The purpose of this residency is to foster interspecies encounters in a non-invasive manner. Using puppetry as a tool for meeting and understanding the other without disruption. We believe that knowing your fellow non-humans closer on a daily basis invites a more careful and responsible ways of being for us all. We also really like puppets, and think they can do anything!

Every creature here has its own way of world-building, and ways of enacting its intelligence. It is not always visible to humans, because we measure intelligence by our use of it in the world. Recognizing faces, measuring distances or solving puzzles are considered signs of intelligence for us. But what use is recognizing faces to a mole? They have their own mode of recognizing the world and acting upon it - sensory, based on touch and smell. And their decisions on how to build underground tunnels - their infrastructure - are determined by touch and smell.

Over the course of three Sundays, we will study the ecosystem around us with a help of an ecologist; make puppets, learn movement techniques and bring them to life; and create an immersive play where the puppets and the environment are the main focus.

Day by Day program description:

Day 1 – 13th of september – 11.00 to 17.00

To recognize these differences, on the first day we will engage in observing, studying different time and scale of being, consulting with an ecologist of the island to get to know specific species, and start making our mock-ups of them.

How did the species end up on the island? Is it a part of an older local ecosystem? Is it invasive? Who does it interact with and how does it shape the world around it? What symbolic meaning do we attach to it as humans, and does it have any relevance to its way of life? If not, what else could we learn from it?

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Day 2 - 20th of september – 11.00 to 17.00

The second day is all about bringing a puppet to life.

Here, not only beings and ecologies come into play, but crafting, and creative decision making as well. Because you have made mock-ups on the last session, we want to kick off this day with puppetry techniques class, to learn how a puppet could move.

Then we have the rest of the day focused on making your puppet solely for making plus consultations on zoo-anthropology.

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Day 3 - 27th of september – 11.00 to 17.00

The third day is we get more into how a puppet can move, how do you animate a non-human puppet. What ways of communicating with the audience can it have? What stories does it want to tell?

We will compose a play by taking the puppets to the places we first encountered them, and build-up scenography together with the environment. At the end we will perform an immersive theatre play for an audience.

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