Nature is Greater Than Us

Pop-up Exhibition 3

Details

Date: Saturday July 26th, 2025

Opening Times: 13:00 - 20:00

Location: Pop-up Studio 57E4
TREEHOUSE NDSM
T.T. NEVERITAWEG 55-57
1033 WB AMSTERDAM

General info

Visitors are welcome throughout May, June & July (check the About page for updated opening hours). Once a month we will host an exhibition day with a special program to share progress on the project. More info on this below.

Program

Join us for a project recap as artists share their multimedia artworks in a pop-up visual art exhibition as well as a program of short films and performances. Participating artists: Bruna Souza, Vere Maagdenberg, Karin Balog, Seçil Güven, Denis Gallen, Jacco Groen, Iyamari, Lyanne Keegstra, Laura Goossens and Roberta Petzoldt.

18:00 - 20:00

Project introduction by artist and curator Bruna Souza in the Pavillion

Short film screening: The Definition of Silence - Karin Balog

Dance Performance: Nothing But Nerve Endings - Laura Goossens

Short Film Screening: Absolute Zero - Karin Balog

Short film screening: Typhoon Yolanda - Jacco Groen

Short film screening: Mountains of Life - Lyanne Keegstra

Performance: Failure Notice Resurrection - Roberta Petzoldt

Short film screening: Telescore – Japanese Cherry Blossom - Iyamari

Performance: We Are Part of Nature - Iyamari

Seçil Güven

Bruna Souza

Vere Maagdenberg

Curator Bruna Souza

Karin Balog

Jacco Groen

Laura Goossens

Roberta Petzoldt

Iyamari

Artworks

When the river spoke, no one listened (2025)
Bruna Souza
Mixed media installation (paper, photographs, pen, glue, water, sand, acrylic paint)

The work invites viewers to witness the slow violence of climate change in real time. A large vertical scroll layered with archival material (photographs, handwritten notes, and mixed media) is gradually stained by the slow drip of mud trickling down the scroll in real time throughout the exhibition. The orange-tinted mixture references the floodwaters of the Guaíba River in Brazil, forging its own wild path through obstacles.

Each drop seeps with quiet tension, evoking the ticking of a clock. Time becomes embodied, absorbed into the paper, distorting and staining the material like trauma sinking into memory. As the water flows over news articles and scientific facts warning of these potential disaster, it erases, drowns, and silences the words, much like climate scientists had warned of the potential floods for over 40 years to deaf ears. When the liquid dries, it leaves behind cracked, ghost-like stains. These echoes of impact linger long after the event has passed, becoming a metaphor for the physical and emotional residue disasters imprint on bodies, landscapes, and collective memory.

Water, water, everywhere, not a drop to drink (2025)
Bruna Souza
Mixed media installation (bottles, water, acrylic paint, sand)

This installation exhibits water bottles filled with mud, representative of the muddy, orange floodwaters (lamas alaranjadas) that engulfed Rio Grande do Sul in 2024 during its most disastrous flood in history. As heavy rainfall overflowed the Guaíba river, thousands of people were left without access to clean drinking water, despite being ironically surrounded by water. Mobilizing donations from around the country, rescue efforts prioritized access to bottled water for the victims. The piece invites viewers to reflect on our dependency on water and its contradictions: it’s essential for life, but simultaneously capable of such destruction.

We Eat The Alps (2025)
Vere Maagdenberg
Photography
Photography & text collage

We Eat the Alps explores the paradox of alpine tourism: we come seeking peace and purity, yet help erode the very landscape we long for. With every season, the glaciers recede, avalanches increase, and the mountains grow more fragile. The Alps are being consumed by our hungry appetite for more and with crumbling mountains as result.

Artist Bio:
As a visual artist working with photography and film, I’m drawn to people, their emotions, their stories, and their connection to the world around them. My work explores femininity, vulnerability as strength, and the impact of human behavior on both people and the planet. Themes such as empowerment, tourism, climate change, and split perspectives often play a role in my practice. Through visual storytelling, I aim to reflect, connect, and gently challenge both myself and the viewer.

Nothing But Nerve Endings
Laura Goossens
Dance performance

An improvisational piece that relates to the struggle in accepting the lack of control we have and moving forward without knowing what's next, which feels like walking with our eyes closed. The idea once came to Laura when she told herself to be a jellyfish. Jellyfish don't resist the current—they yield to it. They drift, feel, respond. They survive this way. They are nothing but nerves, not even a brain or a heart. Laura tries to tap into this when she dances; she senses, she feels. She doesn't think, though she might react. She believes sometimes survival is not about the fight, but the letting go. Sometimes people survive in nature's disaster just drifting along, holding onto a random object while the strong current of the river takes them afloat.

Artist Bio:
Laura Goossens is a freelance dancer, teacher, and choreographer, currently based in Utrecht. Previously she was the rehearsal director for the Joffrey Concert Group and Mason Lee Dance Theater in NYC, as well as performing in different festivals and projects there. She received her BFA from Joffrey Ballet School and is also a graduate of the Conservatorio de Artes Escenicas WDC in Costa Rica. Laura is interested in connecting to her body— and everything beyond— through dance.

Failure Notice Resurrection
Roberta Petzoldt
Performance: poetry, drum & loop sample machine

For this evening Petzoldt improvised an experimental nature-related performance.

Artist Bio:
As a graduate of the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Petzoldt is a transdisciplinary artist. Petzoldt works as a poet, performer, actress, and visual artist. In her performances she often collaborates with musicians and light projections. In her solo performances she developed a style in which she uses a loop sampler to make her poems into performance.

We are a part of nature
Iyamari
Performance: poetry & video

Artist Iyamari presents a live spoken performance with sound created from tree surface patterns, part of her Telescore project. As moving film images by artist Charlotte Bernson are projected onto her body, Iyamari reflects on how living alongside natural disasters in Japan has shaped ways of thinking, including cultural concepts like Zen. Through voice, music, and image, the performance invites us to consider: in the face of loss and uncontrollable change, can we find balance by accepting that humans are not separate from nature — we are part of it?

Artist Bio:
Iyamari is a Japanese contemporary artist. Since the experience of physical death at the age of 20, exploration of "what constitutes the world" through the subject of time and perception has been a lifelong theme throughout her work. Maybe... subconsciously, she is trying to recapture what was lost in that moment.

Telescore - Japanese Cherry Blossom (2025)
Iyamari
Video 10:00

When we think of disaster, we often imagine something large and visible. But quiet, continuous changes in nature — the slow fading of a single tree — can hold the same weight. This film follows the life of a cherry blossom tree in Japan, reflecting on impermanence as a form of silent collapse. Featuring Butoh dancer Norihito Ishii and music created from the tree’s surface patterns, the work invites us to see disaster not only as sudden destruction, but as part of the ongoing cycle between humans and nature.

Typhoon Yolanda
Jacco Groen
Video

A haunting look at the aftermath of Typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan), which struck the Eastern Philippines in 2013 with winds reaching 315 km/h. The disaster claimed 6,352 lives. Groen's footage captures not only the destruction, but also the complexity of human behavior in crisis—where not everyone helps, and predators sometimes target the vulnerable.

Artist Bio:
Jacco Groen is the general director of Springfilm. As a writer, director, and producer of documentaries and drama productions, he is committed to shedding light on overlooked communities and untold stories.

Absolute Zero
Karin Balog
Video

An evocative exploration of the color bleaching crisis affecting the Great Barrier Reef.

Artist Bio:
As a mixed media artist, graduated from the Royal Academy in The Hague, Karin Balog uses various disciplines like dance, drawing and graphics in experimental films and she works with Concrete Poetry related texts on canvas. The art work deals with globalization, day and night rhythm and a sense of rewriting geography. The cosmos, the earth and the climate change cause a shift in relation to time that passes by. The artworks and films are on display at film festivals and exhibitions in India, London, New York and Italy.

Artworks also shown previously in Pop-up Exhibition 2