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NEO-FUTURISTIC WALKS: WETLANDS /// ROTTERDAM

In 2023, I collaborated with Neo Futuristic Walks on their Wetlands series, creating a scripted tour that explored the layered meanings and histories of Prins Alexander and the Hoge Bergse Bos in Rotterdam, focusing on their connections to past, current, and future urgencies surrounding water. Although this location may seem unexpected to the uninformed, it holds, in fact, a treasure trove of significant hidden layers related to the city's challenges.


event-images by Hosein Danesh

As the walk unfolded, participants slipped into one of four distinct roles: the Ground Excavator, the Mountain Builder, the Overgrowth Engineer, or the Tireless Energy Agent. Each persona carried its own way of seeing, shaped by specific interests, knowledge, and concerns tied to the site.

Guided by booklets, materials, and tools designed for their roles, the groups moved through the landscape, each uncovering a different layer of the same place. Their paths ran parallel yet remained separate, and each group was unaware of how the others interpreted what lay before them.


Only at the end of each of the three stops did these hidden perspectives surface. At these moments, the script brought the groups together in a shared theatrical encounter in which their separate insights met, overlapped, and briefly revealed the site in its full, layered complexity.





This walk is part of: https://neofuturisticwalks.com/
Neo-futuristic Walks is a series of “walkable” city inspections that shape a community of neo-futurists to collectively re-imagine new ways of urban coexistence. Through the act of walking, neo-futurists explore the primal bodily experience’s role in unfolding new relationships in and with urban environments. They employ context-sensitive speculative scenarios to live in constant preparation for the inescapable urban futures. Neo-futurists see the cities as vast, lively ecosystems in which every individual’s well-being is interdependent.
Wetlands was funded by Creative Industries Fund NL.