Call for participation

The School for MultiSpecies Knowledges invites practitioners in the areas of artistic research and art pedagogies to activate their practices in a situational exploration at Zone2Source, testing ground for art and ecology in the Amstelpark, Amsterdam.

Zone2Source, together with the Zoonomic Institute and the municipality of Amsterdam, is in the process of establishing Zoöp Amstelpark as a testing site for multispecies politics. In the framework of 750 years Amsterdam, we have challenged the city to govern Amsterdam in the coming 750 years as a city of billions of lives instead of 1 million people. The Amstelpark will be a place for collective learning to experiment with alternative scenarios of how politics, law, design, planning, etc., will look like, if we make the interest of all living organisms part of our decision-making processes. But what are the implications of this proposal for the way one learns, evaluates and shares knowledges in the Zoöp? What kind of embodied pedagogies are needed to attune ourselves differently to our living environment, in which thinking and action come together to lead to real transformation?

The School for MultiSpecies Knowledges assembles a learning community, consisting of five practitioners, who, through practice-led artistic research, will experiment over the course of six months with new learning temporalities, activities, and methods of evaluating them. Ultimately, the group will develop proposals for the collective learning we need to implement if ecology is at the heart of everything we do.

The School for MultiSpecies Knowledges seeks to develop learning principles for citizens, young and old, that enable transformative shifts towards relational ways of belonging in a multispecies city.

School’s duration

Starting in October 2025, the project will unfold over several stages, with a total duration of six months. The initial phase of the School will include two intensive working days in the 2nd week of October to settle in the park and introduce ourselves to one another. The research will begin within two weeks after the introduction with ‘a conversation with the park’—an engagement moment with visitors, so our initial interaction with the public and the diverse voices of the park will shape the research. During this phase, the participating artists will test their ideas in a setting of public engagement. To conclude this phase, the group as a learning community will evaluate and develop the core principles of the curriculum to enhance their learning. The durations and intensities of the remaining stages will be determined based on the community’s self-evaluation and reflection.

School’s test ground and home base

The Amstelpark will serve as a learning ground for citizens and politicians alike to build on new practices and systems for multispecies politics for a city that is home to billions of living organisms. The School for MultiSpecies Knowledges will form as a site to experiment with artistic pedagogies and build on a curriculum of tactics in which education moves beyond information transfer towards participatory and transformative engagement. The participating artists of the School will be able to connect to the ongoing artistic projects in Zone2Source, exploring relevant topics.

Zone2Source offers the Rietveld House – outside of the office days of the organisation on Mondays and Thursdays – as a co-working space for participating artists.

School’s learning approach

The School for MultiSpecies Knowledges has only learners – no experts, students, or facilitators. Our core group of participants, a maximum of five people, will be quite intimate, so we can hold a grip on the emerging collaboration dynamics.

Instead of a learning based on a curriculum, our journey focuses on collaboratively developing an art-led curriculum for regenerative multispecies co-living. We do not avoid ‘politics of learning’ and pose questions regarding its conditions, tactics, goals, evaluation criteria, and approaches to arts-based learning. Specifically, we concentrate on articulating learning goals, evaluation criteria and procedures addressing the questions:

• Which skills, attitudes, sensitivities, and knowledges enable us to learn in an inter-relational and regenerative way with more-than-human others, and to actively engage people of all ages in regenerative environmental learning practices?
• Which ‘proficiencies’ do we need to move from one phase of our School to another, or even possibly ‘graduate’?
  Which curriculum and learning conditions allow long-term transformations?
• How do we know that we have (or can) arrived where we wanted to be?
• What are the criteria for artistic practice to evaluate the transformative effect when it comes to public engagement?
  Eventually, how do we build a curriculum of artistic pedagogies around co learning for the School of MultiSpecies Knowledges?

Do you want to join?

We invite interested individuals or small collectives to submit a proposal outlining how their artistic practice, in a specific artistic endeavour/expression, can lead to regenerative change in and with the context of Amstelpark, in alignment with the School’s aims and questions.

Practical information

Q&A – Sept 3, 16.00 hrs
Application deadline – Sept 8

In order to apply for the programme, please send your CV and proposal (max 2 A4) via the email to info@zone2source.net. We have room for up to 5 participants.

To answer the questions regarding the programme and application procedure, we will hold a Teams meeting on Wednesday September 3 at 4 PM. Please sign up here if you want to join.

The School for MultiSpecies Knowledges is a multiannual project started in 2021, and a collaboration between Alice Smits, director/curator of Zone2Source, and Irina Shapiro, an artist-pedagogue, whose research focus is on institutional and alternative curriculum developments that act within multiscale, multi-species environments and open up interrelational forms of knowing.