A Slowdown: Conversations on a Sustainable Practice with Urgent Ecologies 
Friday 20 June, 14:00-16:30h (2,5 hr) - walk-in at 13:30
Location: W139

How can artists and designers make their own practice more sustainable for themselves? The current political and ecological climate requires urgent action. We need to move fast, before we run out of resources. But how do we navigate this landscape without burning ourselves down first? Let's slow down for a moment, get personal, get engaged together, and move from there.    

This workshop is for students and beginning artists, designers and artistic researchers to exchange gained knowledge and ideas about what a sustainable art practice could look like – especially while taking your own needs and resources into account. 

For this occasion, Urgent Ecologies also invited several artists/designers/artistic reasearchers (etc.) to join the conversations in small gorups (see list of names and bio below). In between the conversations we will do body-awareness exercises by Rosalie Bak (affective, artistic researcher and haptonomic professional). 

During the workshop we will move between an individual and collective perspective by means of connecting to ourselves, the space we are holding together, and our shared responsibility for the world - we are also part of. We will highlight the importance of the moment itself and create a physical, collective output made of clay that will be part of the exhibition PPP by collective Sunflower Soup at W139. 

Do you want to participate at W139 on Friday 20 June? Please sign up here. There are limited spots, full is full.   

This workshop is part of the exhibition and open workspace for collaborative experimentation:  PPP by Sunflower Soup (23 May – 27 July 2025)   

Urgent Ecologies is an initiative of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, focusing on fostering a fundamental ecological and sustainable approach within art education. They provide policy advice and organise and support various projects, events, and collaborations – many of which are initiated by students and staff. Examples are a community garden on campus (The Garden Department), a pilot project to create a vegan canteen, a fund to encourage the use of sustainable production methods, and a materials library.

Invited artists, artistic researchers and designers:

Rosalie Bak 

Rosalie Bak works at the intersection of affective research, embodiment, and spatial practices, with a strong focus on ecology, art, and somatic care. As an artist and haptonomic professional she is interested in the ambiguous relationship between people and their non/living environments and explores how to make complex predicaments experiential through the body. Her multidisciplinary practice spans from the development of new methodologies and pedagogies to storytelling, writing and the design of workshops, walks and experiences, often working with communities, scientists, (artistic) research groups and the more-than-human world.

Mariana Jurado Rico

Mariana Jurado Rico is an artist and curator working with printing, installation, publishing, radio, and video performance to facilitate points of merger between people. Her works build situations with elements of humor, failure, impatience, and contradiction as tools of resistance. Currently she is working on different collaborative projects that tackle her interest in independent initiatives and self-initiated processes.

Together with Francisca Khamis Giacoman, she founded Espacio Estamos Bien (EEB),  an autonomous non-autonomous space for contradictory things to happen based in Amsterdam that organizes gatherings, publications, exhibitions, and other formats. EEB started plotting the idea of a new space in Amsterdam—not necessarily a physical one—that could provide an affective and supportive context. A space for those who do not belong in the institutional circuit. A space that is always changing, always moving, but always available. EEB is an initiator of conversations and a facilitator of situations.  

Nina van Hartskamp

Nina van Hartskamp is a multidisciplinary artist, botanical dyer, and story weaver. She graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in 2020. Her research-based practice unfolds through socially engaged projects that explore the interconnections between humans, non-humans, and the environment.

Working with materials such as plants, microbes, second-hand textiles, audio, video, and performance, Nina’s projects grow out of intimate exchanges with people and places. Her work is guided by questions of belonging, co-existence, and planetary interdependence.

Through site-specific, immersive experiences—including public installations, collective rituals, and community workshops—she invites participants and audiences to reflect on their relationships with each other and the more-than-human world. Her work offers poetic resistance to extractive systems, individualism, capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy. 

Harriet Rose Morley

Harriet Rose Morley is a UK-born artist, researcher, and initiator based in the Netherlands since 2018. Her practice explores the gender and labour politics of technical skill within art, design, and architecture, focusing on the working conditions of cultural and technical practitioners. Through her ongoing research Hard Work, Soft Work, she investigates both visible technical skills and undervalued soft skills essential to collective work. A graduate of the Glasgow School of Art and a Dutch MA program, she has led material- and collaboration-based projects, taught across UK and Dutch institutions, and worked with diverse disciplines from architecture to blacksmithing. From 2023–2025, she was Co-Director of Platform BK. In 2025, she will be a Tech Fellow at the Rijksakademie and a resident at Kunsthal Gent.

Amalie ‘Sveske’ Ourø

Amalie ‘Sveske’ Ourø is a Danish artist who has been living, studying and working in the Netherlands since 2018. Her work, mostly performative and site-specific, can be best described as art-anthropology and is inspired by her curiosity about humanity and reflections of the inner workings of our society. Through her work she actively engages with the audience through acts of play and subversion, inviting them to think critically about diverse societal urgencies within the field of sociology, urbanism, and ecology — encouraging meaningful and sustainable change along the way.

Amalie Sveske Ourø is part of the art and garden collectives; The Garden Department (Gerrit Rietveld Academie) & Pleasure Ground .