Community Garden & Art Residency

Nature of Rotterdam (NoR) is an artist residency I co-founded with Tianyi Zheng, growing directly from my own artistic practice and research. Set within Rotterdam’s volkstuin (allotment garden), the residency invites artists to spend time in community gardens — working with soil, seasons, neighbours, and the everyday rhythms of urban nature. Artists develop site-responsive projects through observation, making, and exchange, leading to public exhibitions, workshops, and publications.

My role within NoR moves between organising, curating, and caring for relationships. I work closely with artists and local communities, creating spaces for conversation, shared drinks, open studios, and collective making. For me, connecting with people in their immediate surroundings is not separate from artistic work — it is part of it. I see places not as fixed physical locations, but as lived experiences shaped through presence, movement, and encounter.

The residency extends my own way of working — a process I describe as doing and seeing — into a collective setting. Through slow engagement and embodied attention, NoR becomes a living framework where artistic research unfolds alongside community life. It reflects my belief in art as something that grows through participation, care, and long-term presence, weaving together creative practice, ecological awareness, and shared experience.