Presentation:

Gentle Dance

Help us build Pigeon Towers by dancing on Mycelium

9 Feb 2024

With a new monthly batch of mycelium we are ready to rock the house again! This edition we do this with live music by musician Giuseppe Doronzo in collaboration with other musicians and pigeon tower artist Arne Hendriks. Help us build new towers around our biotope. Come by, take off your shoes, put on our white socks, grab a drink and dance for free.

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Gentle Dance Illustration by Britt Vendel -

Pigeon Towers

Every two to three weeks, a new pigeon tower emerges at the Biotoop. These structures are an ongoing experiment to build with living mycelium waste from oyster mushroom farms. The project investigates questions such as: Can we build structures to house feral pigeons? What is the best design to build a tower with mycelium? And how long does it take for the bricks to grow together? Through experimenting with different shapes, and building structures, we see how the material responds, and if we can build a comfy living space for the pigeons of Amsterdam. 

Arne Hendriks

Arne Hendriks is guiding the pigeon tower project. He is an artist and researcher on human ecology. He explores the borders of specific cultural values that define our relationship with the planet. His projects include The Incredible Shrinking Man that researches if it is possible to downsize the human species to better fit the earth and Fatberg, the building of an island of fat. As a regular Mediamatic collaborator, he directed several projects to draw attention to our (sometimes twisted) relation with the planet and its resources, like Kool Abundance, The Starvation Experiment, and the building of a holy pigeon tower out of recycled newspapers.

Sign up

The Gentle Dance is free, just pass by on February 9th 2024 17:30 - 19:00, at Dijksgracht 6 Amsterdam.

In case you have any questions, you can send an email to program@mediamatic.nl.