Animal Encounters / Het Nieuwe Instituut

ANIMAL ENCOUNTERS

Location: Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam (NL)
Client: Het Nieuwe Instituut
Team: Giovanni Bellotti, Alessandra Covini with Lauren Boots, Marie Saladin, Sze Wing Chan, Mees Temmik, Leopold Castin
Partners: Het Nieuwe Instituut, Jan Van Eyck Academy
Graphic Design: Anton Stuckardt
Photographer: Johannes Schwartz
Year: 2019

A spatial installation by Studio Ossidiana explores how architecture might mediate between all sorts of creatures, making room for a variety of encounters and setting the stage for interactions between humans and non-humans. The installation is an environment occupied by drawings, diagrams and architectural models – creature-like objects – that address issues of proximity, scale and cross-species politics. Through the display of a series of emblematic projects, various relationships between the human and non-human world are made tangible. The installation is based on Giovanni Bellotti’s prior thesis research on bird habitats and bird cages (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2018), and on Studio Ossidiana current creative residency at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht. Also occupying this environment is an archive selection centred around the educational vision of architect Aldo van Eyck. It includes a student project for an aquarium by Jan Verhoeven and a hippopotamus shelter by Joost Váhl. These structuralist approaches to animal architecture propose a relational and ecological understanding of the animal-human encounter. Further expanding on ecology and systems theory is the intervention by Evangelos Kotsioris, assistant curator at MoMA. Kotsioris will be a visiting scholar in November and will present his research on cybernetics, computerization and architecture during a public seminar.

Animal Encounters is the successor to Habitat: Expanding Architecture, and part of the Total Space project.