Artworks – Artworks 4 Sustanability

Artworks

This is a collection of my students efforts to use art and artistic methods to explore human-environment relations. The first part of the course is based in The Hague and the second part of the course takes place on Terschelling during the Oerol Festival.

The Hague

The Hague (Magazine)

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ArtWorks: The Hague Magazine

This first edition of ArtWorks-The Hague focuses on local artists in the SouthWest neighborhood of The Hague. Through the LDE Thesis Hub, specifically the efforts of Mandy Koenraads who coordinates this program, we were able to connect with artisitc projects in this neighborhood. Students also found projects on their own. One group created their own project-a radio show. And another chose a project in Amsterdam because it was closing down.

Oerol

Oerol (Magazine) – V1

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ArtWorks: Oerol Magazine 2024

This first edition of ArtWorks-Oerol was commisioned by the Oerol organizing committee. They selected the artworks they wanted our students to focus on and facilitated contact with the artists as well as providing access to the ticketed performances so that students could experience it for themselves.

Oerol (Magazine) – V2

** For optimal viewing, please use a tablet or larger screen.

ArtWorks: Oerol Magazine 2025

The second edition of ArtWorks–Oerol brings together another inspiring collection of artworks showcased at this year’s Oerol Festival. Our students once again immersed themselves in installations, performances, and landscapes that challenge how we think about nature, memory, resilience, and sustainable futures.

Website design by Muhammad Uzair Usman

Course Description

Across the globe humans face the challenge of building successful livelihoods, ones that not only bring them financial security and stability, but enhance their capabilities and provide them with other important aspects of well-being, be it good health, happiness, identity, and/or belonging. Such pursuits are arguably taking place in increasingly complex, dynamic, inter-connected and challenging environments. Population pressure, climate change, resource depletion, are only some of the forces pushing us to find innovative ways to adapt to changing ecologies, enhance livelihood resilience, and ensure a continued productive and healthy resource base.

In the Netherlands, for example, farmers and fisherman on the Wadden islands (a UNESCO natural world heritage site) are trying to find ways to retain their coastal livelihoods while accommodating growing tourism and a strong conservation movement aimed at mitigating the threats posed by mining, gas drilling and infrastructure developments. Meanwhile in The Hague, residents fight against physical and cultural displacements in the face of demographic changes, urban renewal policies, and complicated processes of gentrification.

If we want to play a part in facilitating and protecting sustainable livelihoods, be it in an urban metropolis or rural coastal village, we need to understand livelihood systems, the complex relationships between humans and the environments they inhabit or make use of.

Anchored in environmental anthropology and the approaches of cultural, political, and ethnoecology, this field course will train students in field methods; in innovative, participatory, playful and self-reflective methodological approaches and techniques to study human-environment interactions. While we will focus on applying such techniques to questions around sustainable livelihoods and how people engage with, make meaning from, and adapt to the environment, this field methods orientation can be applied to any field and any topic. It is designed for students from all majors.

Students will learn how to approach the field, with attention paid to the ethics of fieldwork and data collection as well as how to enter and be in the field, making use of all of our senses and taking the time to process and self-reflect on our integration and our learning. There is a strong focus in this course on art activism and the use of art and artistic techniques to not only provide insight into conceptualizations of sustainable livelihoods but also to advocate for them. Through this artistic lens we will focus on having fun in fieldwork and on playful ways to learn and listen and connect with people in new fields of inquiry and new spaces. We will try to bring out the inner artist in you.

The field methods of focus will include (participant) observation, drawing, social mapping, interviewing, and reflective journaling. The course will highlight the value of innovative, creative, mixed-method and participatory approaches.

One of the main assignments will be to experience and study artistic works in the city and at the Oerol festival and to develop new editions to the ArtWorks4Sustainable Livelihoods magazines. See last years’ edition are HERE. [Insert Link]