On Sunday 22 March, the 2nd School for Multispecies Knowledges hosts a full day in Amstelpark from sunrise and sunset.

We welcome all species to gather in the current conversation with the park. This program is an open invitation to activate your senses, to practice attuning to other forms of life, and to step into a shared field of attention guided by the participants of the School.

Throughout the day, you are welcome to participate in this ongoing process. Join us in this gesture of listening, sensing, and becoming-with. The meeting point during the day is the Rietveldhuis in the heart of Amstelpark, where soup and tea made with ingredients from Amstelpark are served.

The program of the day:

TO get into the park before opening time – be at the red bridge entrance latest at 6:30! 

* All day in the Rietveld House join us making a Multispecies Knowledges Zine *

6:37 – 10.07_Natascha Hagenbeek_Noschool, Nongkrong! – “hanging out” as a radical pedagogy: We will be testing Nongkrong by applying its social logic to the more-than-human world. Bring cushions and blankets to “hang out” with soil, plants, and birds for an extended period of time. Starting at 6:37 to experience the sunrise. (Noschool, Nonkrong for humans was pioneered by the Indonesian art collective Serrum).

Note: You can hook up at any time between 6:37 and 10:07, in silence. Follow the sign Nongkrong at the red bridge entrance.

10:07 – 11.07_Marjolijn Boterenbrood_ Foraging – for Eat the Park – looking for edible plants in the park, tastes for the soup: Eat the Park. Ongoing in the Rietveld House_Mariken Overdijk: a Zine Following a Thread of the Day_the anatomy of the spider unfolds and breathes deeply in and out as we leaf through the pages of her book lungs; Web-questioning emptiness might appear.

11.07 – 11.37_Mariken Overdijk_Arachna-scores: walking with spiders – A human being. A face with holes: nose, eyes, ears. Mouth. A strong breath makes my web tremble. Rolling eyes search, examine my web, and by virtue of catching prey, I remain here for a while longer.  My sharply curved poisonous fangs have done their duty, dug in, numbed, sucked dry, spindled. The venom lies in the great not-knowing.

11.37-12.07_Irina Shapiro_Questioning with the Park. We learn with the park—observing, listening, attuning, and questioning. Questioning becomes a starting point for unlearning: unsettling habitual ways of knowing and being. Through Questioning with the Park, we gather the wonderings that have accompanied this learning community and map the emerging relations between them.

12:07_Marjolijn Boterenbrood_ Eat the park – Soup from Foraging

12:07 – 13.07 Collective lunch with everybody!

13:07 – 14.07_Junying Wu_ Niche partitioning – to be a bird, not a feather —is a mini workshop invites participants to explore the notion of an ecological hypothesis ‘niche partitioning’ by giving attention to voicing and listening. The session will include on-site guidance on field recording and embodied soundscape composition.

14:07 -15:07_Lea Novi_ Observation Drawing is a very slow walk through the park where we draw what we notice. It is an invitation to observe animals and their traces, plant movement, and the sounds of the park more closely. Drawing becomes a tool to concentrate on seeing and sensing what is often overlooked in the living world. It is a way to experiment with connecting to other species in the park. The session begins with a poem and ends with a collective sharing round.

15:07- 15:37_Irina Shapiro_Questioning with the Park

15:37-16.07_Marjolijn Boterenbrood_Performance Waterarchive – Eat the Park. Boterenbrood appears to emerge from the water, with underwater life trailing around her habit, aquatic life that produced our oxygen over millions of years. The drawings are edible, allowing aquatic life to enter your body. Come and taste it: Eat the Park.

16.07-17.07_Christine Hvidt_Sounding Crow Mantras / Corvid fuglenes mantra – Experimental outdoor vocal attunement session of deep meditative attention through repetition, breathing, and shared sounding of mantras from the Crows of Amstelpark.

17:07 – 18.07_Alice Smits +Theun Karelse_Herding with the Moose – Humans are holobionts. Only 50% of our DNA is human. Reading a series of quotes, we delve into an imagination where we come to understand ourselves as complex ecosystems, with porous connections between inside and outside, and part of social and ecological entanglements. In Herding with the Moose, we move with a moose built by artist Theun Karelse during a walk in  the park. How does a moose move through the landscape, and what place would it occupy within the ecosystem? Afterwards, as a group, we will spend an hour silently moving as a herd through the park. As we walk new paths, without apparent purpose and guided by multi-sensory sensations, we attempt to feel and move as a herd, as a collective body.

18:07-18:37_Maeve Kuitenbrouwer_Gathering the Day. At the end of the day, we bring the threads together through movement, reflection, and shared awareness in the park.

18:37-18:53_Natascha Hagenbeek_Noschool-Nongkrong (at the Red Bridge) – The meeting point throughout the day is the Rietveld House in the middle of the Amstelpark, where soup and tea harvested from Amstelpark will be served. All program components are intended as an invitation to participate for all species visiting the park that day.

This event marks the conclusion of the 2nd School for Multispecies Knowledges (October 2025 – March 2026), developed by Zone2Source, a testing ground for art and ecology in Amstelpark. in collaboration with artist and pedagog Irina Shapiro.

Through an open call, a learning community was formed: Marjolijn Boterenbrood, Junying Wu, Christine Hvidt, Natascha Hagenbeek, Lea Novi, and Mariken Overdijk. Meeting weekly in the park, they have explored artistic research and art education as relational practices — seeking learning principles that enable transformative shifts toward belonging within a multispecies city.