Artist Arne Hendriks has been building pigeon towers of live oyster mushroom mycelium around Mediamatic for 4 years. But what do they actually mean for the city and to what extent do they contribute to our ambition to establish a nature-inclusive relationship with the environment? We ask Thijs de Zeeuw, who designed the new elephant and lion enclosures at Artis, and urban ecologist Atze van der Goot. 
The Living Tower Talk, co-curated by Arne Hendriks, is a monthly event intended to foster a collective exploration of knowledge from mycelium-waste pigeon-towers, transcending the boundaries of human and non-human realms.
The Living Tower Talk, a collaborative learning process, encourages us to explore new ways of creating and acquiring knowledge. It takes us on a journey where the destination is not predetermined but rather emerges as we engage in conversations and discoveries. Our findings are shared within a circle, accompanied by a tasty mushroom-based dish, sourced directly from the towers at Mediamatic's Biotoop.
Information
Friday 23th of February
18:00 - 19:00
Full price (inc. meal) €11,00
Student, artist, Stadspas (inc. meal) €7,50
Tickets Thijs de Zeeuw - Landscape architect and nature-optimist. Foto: Anneke Hymmen
Thijs de Zeeuw is trained as a landscape architect. He graduated at the Academy of Architecture in Amsterdam in 2011 on the ‘(un)conditional garden’, a garden which exhibits urban wildlife. Simultaneously he worked for H+N+S Landscape Architects where he designed on the typical Dutch landscape: dikes, polders, and nature development sites. The past eight years, Thijs designed enclosures for ARTIS, the Royal zoo of Amsterdam. Designing for ‘a client you can’t speak with’ has proved to be an ever-fascinating challenge. It has made him more and more aware of the perspective of ‘the other’.
Atze van der Goot is an ecologist with the province of North Holland, where he is heavily involved in connecting and defragmenting the landscape. In his spare time, he does research with wildlife cameras on the distribution of animal species in and around Amsterdam. This is how he and his companions from @020Wildlife discovered the first otter in Amsterdam on the wildlife camera.
Arne Hendriks is guiding the pigeon tower project. He is an artist and researcher on human ecology, who explores the borders of specific cultural values that define our relationship with the planet. His projects include The Incredible Shrinking Man, that questions if it's possible to downsize the human species to better fit the earth and Fatberg, the building of an island made 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.
