Coming weekend in Nieuwkoop (June 6 & 7)

Bodies of Water – Performance, Nieuwkoopse Plassen (Meijepad), Saturday June 6, 14.00

A floating art project by Anne Zarske, with TogetherTogether

Artist Anne Zarske and art collective TogetherTogether invite audience participants to float on the Nieuwkoopse Plassen, to feel the boundaries between self, body, landscape and water dissolve. To experience the point where different ‘bodies of water’ meet..

The Nieuwkoopse Plassen is a living archive: a landscape shaped by peat extraction, flooding, and human hands, yet still moving with its own rhythms of reeds, rivers, and skies. Here, water holds memory—of bogs drained, plots carved, dikes raised, floods endured. It is both wound and lifeline, both human-made and more- than-human.

To float in these waters is to feel this history seep into the body, to sense our own fluid boundaries entangled with the shifting ground beneath. In droughts, floods, and contamination, the crises of water are written not only on the land but also within us. What happens here happens in us: porous beings caught in the same cycles of intake, exchange, and transformation.

To attune to this place is to remember: we are archives of water too—fragile, entangled, and inseparable from its fate.

Bodies of Water

Location

Saturday June 6, 14.00
Meijepad, Nieuwkoop

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Tales from the Swamp
Muziektent Reghthuysplein, Nieuwkoop
Start: 15.00

On Sunday afternoon (June 7) at 15.00, we take to the open air music stage at the historical Reghthuysplein, in the heart of Nieuwkoop.

In ‘Tales from the Swamp’ tale tellers from various wetlands regions in Europe meet to share myths, folklore, symbolic imaginaries, and above all, our love for the soft soil of the peatlands with each other and with the audience in Nieuwkoop.

With:

Sissel Marie Tonn (Studio Sentinel): In her work Sphagnum Time, the artist delved into the myths of bog bodies (in Denmark) and the cultural and ecological significance of peatlands.

Jan van den Helder (Historical Society Nieuwkoop) will share the mythical story of the ‘Monster of Nieuwkoop’ with us, as well as his childhood memories of the Nieuwkoopse Plassen.

Anne Zarske (Artist website) conducted extensive research in and into the Nieuwkoopse Plassen, which led to a new film and a site-specific performance, Bodies of Water, taking place on June 6 at the Meijepad.

In the lecture performance Dainėja [/dɑːˈneɪ.jɑː/] Kim Bode (Bureau of Transitioning Landscapes) and Dr. Dr. Kallia Kefala present their ongoing fieldwork exploring presences emerging from the wetland’s acoustic and ecological memory. Through their research, they reveal how the bog records disturbances and stories beyond conventional perception.
(Presented as part of the extensive artistic research project Sensing Peat)

Location