Barbera Sterk (1966) graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in 2024. She is living and working in Zoeterwoude.

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In this installation, I introduce a second human intervention. Not to improve or restore nature, but to question our desire for order and control. Just as the trees were once planted by human hands, my intervention is also a human act. It highlights the paradox between what grows according to its own logic and what is shaped by human intention.

Perhaps the challenge does not lie in intervening again, but in learning to see what already exists. Nature has its own forms of collaboration and interdependence — not as a system that needs to be designed by us, but as a living network of which we are already a part, and from which we still have much to learn.

Iede Reckman (1981) is a drawing and installation artist whose work is primarily influenced by mathematical and natural phenomena. He graduated from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague in 2003 and obtained a Master's degree from the Glasgow School of Art in 2013. In 2003, he co-founded the artist collective Billytown in The Hague

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The sculpture Carbon Storied ( 370 x 60 x 225cm / wood (beachcombed at De Houthaven Amsterdam), powder coated steel) is a collection and arrangement of all the wood that Reckman found on the quays of Amsterdam's Houthavens in the summer of 2019.

Until 100 years ago, De Houthavens were filled with tree trunks drifting in the water, but nowadays they are no longer used as timber ports. The little wood that can be found now is waste from broken boats, pallets, crates, and other scrap wood. Each piece of wood has its own story. The title of the work revers to the carbon that wood stores and is slowly released by the decaying of the wood. The wood has been shaped by the water in which it has floated for years. The water has started the decaying processes; peeled off paint, rusted screws and nails, and rotting processes, but also traces of organisms living in the water.

Photography: Jhoeko

Iemke van Dijk (1969) is an artist who lives and works in Leiden. She initiated Est Art Foundation there. Van Dijk completed her studies at the St. Joost Academy in Breda and an internship in Paris at the La Courière et Frelaut studio. She teaches at Leiden University (LAK). 

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Van Dijk constructs a creative process in which chance plays a significant role. She uses a variety of materials, such as porcelain for floor installations, graphite for wall drawings, and watercolor on paper. The result is visual work that is both geometric and organic. Regarding The Water Paradox, three works have been selected that showcase the beauty of water’s properties.

Lyda Bekker (1961) is co-founder of the platform Academie van Leiden. She studied fine arts and printmaking at Gerrit Rietveld Academie and School of Visual Arts (NYC). In addition she is teaching at LAK (Leiden University.

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This installation with relief embossing, ecoprints and flowers (No Title) is an investigation/research into botanical relief printing and eco-prints using seeds and seed pods from the private garden, including Columbine, Marigold and Dove’s Foot. Rhythm, patterns and structures emerge through chance and choice. The work shows how water leaves traces through growth and drought.

Miriam de Koning (1965) studied Cultural Studies at the University of Amsterdam. While working in the cultural and publishing field, she developed as a self-taught maker of drawings. In addition she is involved in cultural initiatives like f.i. de Academie van Leiden.

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Water is soft, invigorating and growing. Water cleans, grinds out, dissolves. The riddle of how we are water, and are like water and cannot help mixing in stardust and poison.

Australian scientists Isabel Joy Bear and Richard Thomas describe the smell that is released when rain has fallen after a long period of drought in a new word, a combination of the ancient Greek words petra (stone) and ichor (blood of the gods). Oils, produced by plants during dry periods, accumulate in the soil and on rocks and are released into the air after a rainstorm. When inhaling this strong and refreshing scent of enriched water, some refer to one of man's earliest experiences, which is why I experience petrichor as a connection to our origins and our future.

Puck Pruim (2003) is a graphic design student at KABK, exploring the importance of community and care through a broader range of practices such as artistic research, performance, painting, and bookmaking. 

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This project Soil in Waiting (Two A1 prints and one book) explores how composting as a conscious urban practice can bridge that human-soil disconnection. Engaging in a form of refusal by physically pulling organic matter out of the disposal chain and returning it to where it belongs. It is soil in waiting, holding water efficiently so that what grows in it can thrive and survive without constant intervention. In this way composting becomes more than just rescuing waste from landfill; it becomes a tangible act of care, reducing how much irrigation gardens and plantations need while mending what centuries of extraction pulled apart.

Beneath the urban landscape lies an entire world we have stopped paying attention to. It has been paved over, fenced off, and managed by distant hands. Soil ecosystems are treated as a resource to exploit rather than a community to belong to: extracted from, built upon, and disrupted by centuries of colonial and industrial logic that never asked what it was taking.

It’s a reminder that we are not separate from the living world beneath us, however deep we have buried it.