Underfoot and reaching into the light

Opening: July 7, 7–10pm

With works by: Sander Blomsma, Chiara Catalini, Anna Halek, Nadine Franz, Xuanhong Huang, Shiila Infriccioli, Ariane Jaccarini, Emma Kroos, Bahar Orçun, Shonali Shetty, Agnes Tatzber, Elien Vermoortel, Dominique Willis

Curator: Danai Giannoglou

The Master Interior Architecture: Research + Design at Piet Zwart Institute and its 2022 graduates invite you to Underfoot and reaching into the light, a show featuring their end of the year projects. 

In The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins [1], Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing imagines “other ways of making worlds,” histories told from different points of view and she investigates stories with unexpected protagonists. The chapter of the book titled The Life of the Forest, an important reference for the participants of MIARD and their research, begins with a passage that encapsulates Tsing’s reasoning while creating an ethereal and mystified image: “To walk attentively through a forest, even a damaged one, is to be caught by the abundance of life: ancient and new; underfoot and reaching into the light.” The students of MIARD are exploring this exact condition by looking at it through their own personal prisms informed by a strong interest in alternative ways of spatializing research.

13 installations take over the exhibition, workshop and liminal spaces of HuidenClub in Rotterdam (a former tannery now turned into a cultural venue and artist studios) in order to unfold a wide spectrum of approaches regarding space, the space around, below and above us.

The renegotiation of personal stories that shape one’s identity, modern technology and the questions that it arises, acute looks into nature and extraction as well as the investigation of materials, are a few of the subjects explored in this graduation show.

Working together and next to each other in the MIARD studios for the past two years the students who form a polyphonic group of artists, architects and designers, have built their projects via a process of conversing and exchanging that is visible throughout the exhibition.

Practices that delve into intimate moments as vehicles to navigate the collective experience are presented alongside bodies of research that bring nature and interspecies relationships to the fore. Profound explorations of materials, their qualities, capacities and roles in our natural and urban ecosystems join studies on technology and its possibilities.

Underfoot and reaching into the light is a show that gives shape to those invisible layers of knowledge, codes and misconceptions that exist in most aspects of our lives and that are powerfully mediating our experience of the world.

[1] Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2015)

General opening hours: Friday to Sunday, 11am–6pm
Public transport: Tram 8 Spangen via Rotterdam Centraal & Beurs

Graduation Project Supervisors: Golnar Abbasi, Kris Dittel, Ephraim Joris, Federico Martelli
Graduation Project Chair: Alex Augusto Suárez
External Expert: Nasim Razavian
Project Manager: Eva Garibaldi
Technical Support: Stanley van der Meer, Matthias Hurtl
Graphic Designer: The PZI Archipelago (Urte Baranauskaite, Oliver Doe, Shiila Infriccioli)