About Zone2Source

Zone2Source is an international exhibition platform which invites artists in and outside the glass pavilions of the Amstelpark to develop projects around alternative experiences and practices regarding our ‘natural’ environment. These projects contribute to propose a 21^st century way of dealing with our world in which culture is no longer being seen as an opposite to nature but searches for contemporary definitions in which both are intrinsically entwined.
Zone2Source imagines possible worlds on the cross points of art, science and nature. Zone2Source is concerned with a return to the source to observe and experience anew in order to explore new relations between humans, nature and technology.

“Zone” is well chosen precisely because it has no settled meaning! It designates something of uncertain status, unclear delineation, unsettling atmosphere. It is exactly what you need to redirect attention  away from ‘territory’, ‘Heimat’, ‘land’, ‘soil’, ‘homeland’, or ‘landscape’, and above all, from the Earth viewed from the outside as can be seen in countless atlases or clicked on in so many GPS devices. To underline that the place to land is alien, there is no better way, it seems, than to call it a zone”.

Bruno Latour in: Critical Zone –the science and politics of landing on earth (publication ZKM, p. 13)

Zone2Source presents every two months artists projects in the Glazen Huis while the Rietveld Huis functions as an office, meeting space and visitors centre where information, documentation, texts and objects are on view which give a context to the projects and where the Zone2Source archive will be developed. A program of workshops, lectures and discussions in which art connects to other fields of knowledge such as science and ecology in order to look at issues such as sustainability, energy, production and consumption, food, biological phenomena and engineering, design and architecture, alternative economics, bio-engeneering, self-organization, and habitats will be organized around the art projects to deepen and expand on its scope.
Zone2Source is inspired by the specific character of the Amstelpark: namely the concept of the park as a way to organize and observe nature, and the world exhibition (the pavilions and gardens are inherited from the Floriade of 1972) as a platform for innovative ideas. Now more than ever we need new imaginations and utopian thinking to revive the belief in an alternative way of positioning ourselves in the world. What is needed is a profound shift in understanding our place in the world for which the term ecology itself is being redefined in linking humans, nature and technology in a unified environment. The Amstelpark, which will form the stage for many of the projects in as well as outside idea of the pavilions, offers a unique location to explore these themes from the vantage point of art.
Support
In 2021 Zone2Source is financially supported by Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industrie / Creative Industries Fund and het Amsterdams Fonds voor de kunst (AFK). Over the past years Zone2Source has recieved project subsidies from, amongst others, the Mondriaan Fund, Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds and the municipality of Amsterdam.