ART SCIENCE dialogue feat. Suzette Bousema & Mirja Schoderer
Join us for the ART SCIENCE dialogue featuring artists Suzette Bousema and scholar Mirja Schoderer on Tuesday, September 30. Can our destructive relationship to water and the life it harbors be reversed? In this ART SCIENCE dialogue the work of Suzette Bousema forms the basis of a conversation on how human life has impacted water quality and sea life and how we can find a way towards healing.
In the multimedia installation Dead Zones by Suzette Bousema (NL, 1995), part of our current exhibition Water Views, natural, artistic, and scientific processes intersect, revealing how human actions on land have even penetrated in the seas. Dead zones are oxygen-deprived areas in the ocean. In human-made dead zones, microalgal blooms in coastal waters are fuelled by fertilizers from agriculture and other waste streams. For her Dead Zones project, Bousema researched the dead zones in the Dutch Grevelingenmeer by diving there herself. In her artistic practice, she collaborated with other artists and scientists.
The event will take place in the VU ART SCIENCE gallery and will be moderated by Manuela Zammit. Suzette Bousema’s documentary Dead Zones will be screened at 4PM before the dialogue.
About the speakers
Suzette Bousema (NL, 1995) visualizes contemporary environmental topics in collaboration with scientists. Planetary conditions and our place in them are the starting point in her work; the way humans interfere with nature and how we relate to the Earth on an individual level. She works interdisciplinary with photography, printmaking, glass blowing, weaving, sound, smell, and organic materials such as seaweed. Suzette Bousema graduated from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague (NL) in 2019.
Mirja Schoderer is an Assistant Professor in the Environmental Policy Analysis (EPA) department of the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM). Her research focuses on contestations of natural resources use and control, with a topical emphasis on water, mineral and metal extraction, and the protection of biodiversity. She is interested in how (un)just socio-natures are created through the interplay and mutual construction of biophysical conditions, cognitive-symbolic factors (such as discourses and social imaginaries) and institutional frameworks and their implementation across administrative levels.
Manuela Zammit is a contemporary art historian and critic based in the Netherlands. She currently coordinates the Research & Development department at Nieuwe Instituut (Rotterdam) and lectures in contemporary art and culture at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her writing regularly appears on Metropolis M magazine, academic journals and other more experimental platforms. In 2023, she completed a Research Master in Critical Studies in Art and Culture at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.