anna andrejew - artist-researcher with a background in ethnography, care practices and permaculture.

My practice explores how we can (re)open imaginaries beyond extraction. I create situations that invite people to let the world in, to become affected by other people, places, materials and forms of life. Through different forms and degrees of engagement, these situations create spaces for encounter, attention, contemplation and collective participation.

My slow, often ritualistic practice works through site-responsive interventions, listening, (counter)mapping, writing and publishing, collecting and transforming discarded materials, participatory (de)installations and performative readings. I explore porosity, tracing how people, materials, technologies and environments meet, overlap, depend on one another and transform over time.

Care is both a practice and a political question within my work. I am interested in tending, maintenance, reciprocity and collective organisation, while critically examining how systems of exclusion shape who and what is cared for. Gardens, soils, technological systems, collective spaces, archives, rituals and shared meals become sites through which relationships can be made visible, questioned and reconsidered. I am particularly interested in what becomes possible within conditions of breakdown, transition and uncertainty.

Collective organisation, maintenance and collaboration are integral to my practice. Through artist-run spaces, research collectives, reading groups, community kitchens and care gardens, I explore organising and collaboration as artistic methods for cultivating more caring ways of living together.

Recent research has engaged with soil ecologies, water bodies, breakdown and vulnerability, digital infrastructures, fermentation, and possibilities of photography beyond its human-centred conventions.

Care work

Alongside my artistic practice, I work as a care worker and biodynamic gardener at Mens & Tuin, a care garden in The Hague. Working with people with diverse care needs, I engage with social-therapeutic practices, biodynamic cultivation and collective forms of tending, exploring reciprocal relationships between people, soil, plants and other more-than-human actors.

Collective practices

Somæ ~ with Floris Janssens, exploring land, food, digestion and emotion through fermentation as a relational and transformative practice.

Helicopter ~ an artist-run collective in The Hague developing long-term infrastructures for contemporary art through collective organisation, care and self-governance.

On Solid Ground ~ with Katerina Sidorova, a wandering reading-research group exploring landscape, ecology and situated knowledge.

Permacomputing ~ contributing to distributed communities exploring alternative relationships between technology, ecology and collective organisation.

Currently based between Antwerp, Belgium and The Hague, the Netherlands.


hello(a)annaandrejew(dot)com
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Currently based between Antwerp, Belgium and The Hague, the Netherlands.

activities

2026
• Tending the Unfinished, Towards Non-Extractive Co-Creation – Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp (31 March-30 March). Lecture-performance, exhibition & participatory presentation as somæ (with Floris Janssens) – forthcoming 30 March 2026. Combines theoretical reflection and hands-on engagement on fermentation as method and metaphor in artistic research; relational knowledge production, more-than-human collaboration, and non-extractive methodologies. Includes live ferment-making, tasting, and collective reflection. Based on a publication in Landing.
• This Holds Debris Together – Begijnhof / Hasselt University, Hasselt (26 Feb-12 Mar). Artist– researcher in a collective research program at the Begijnhof, Hasselt (funded by Hasselt University). Performative reading, participatory research session, site-specific installation, and coedited zine. Collaboration with PhD candidate Steffie de Gaetano, extending methodologies from the UHasselt Debris Spring School 2025 to which I also contributed.
• Unfinished Matter – Kunsthal Gent, Ghent (30 jan). Participatory intervention developed in collaboration with artist Sjoerd Beijers, emerging from the Anti-Class Residency and realized through an invitation by Shift Gent. The work explored collectivity, memory, and unfinished matter through the shared act of kneading and inscribing dough. Drawing on ideas of preservation through activation (Henri Langlois) and collective memory practices (Shotwell), participants engaged in a tactile and relational process where touch and gesture functioned as forms of communication beyond words. The dough—temporary, unstable, and constantly reshaped—became a medium for shared reflection, appearing briefly as flatbread, dumpling, or fragment before dissolving again through collective handling and consumption.
• The Listening Academy – Practicing Breakdown - Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian, Lisbon (19–22 January). Artist–researcher contribution. Facilitated a full one-day program on counter-mapping, breakdown, and collective tending practices, focusing on polluted soils and ecological care. Theoretical grounding includes writings by María Puig de la Bellacasa. Guided and contributed to interdisciplinary dialogues on ecological relationality, planetary coexistence, and more-than-human agency. Program organized in the context of Institution(ing)s, funded by EU and Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian.
• Counter-mapping Intervention – Data Centre Infrastructure Walk, Sloterdijk - the Critical Infrastructure Lab (University of Amsterdam), Amsterdam (6 March). Participatory countermapping intervention developed as part of a guided infrastructure walk examining the site of a planned hyperscale data centre near Sloterdijk station. The intervention invited participants to collectively reflect on the allocation of land and water in urban environments. Through countermapping and situated discussion, the walk explored how digital infrastructures -often invisible yet materially intensive- reshape public space, ecological relations, and local economies.
• On Solid Ground – rooted readings (self-initiated reading-research group since 2025 ongoing, with co-organizer Katerina Sidorva). Co-organizing a research-reading group exploring landscape theory and site-specific research.

2025
- university of hasselt debris spring school (may 19–23, vierset-barse, belgium), project passage hasselt university.

• invited to participate and lead a session in this interdisciplinary program on the concept of debris in socio-environmental challenges.
• Guest lecturer at the faculaty of Architecture and Art MARGES.

- CODA paper biennale– the cloud is a place on earth (april–november) – exhibition, performance, publication.
- west ecofeminist symposium– countermapping the garden (march 20) – workshop, west the hague.
- kunst en landschap route– Be Like Water– 6-9 juni exhibition at Museumfabriek Enschede.
- On Solid Ground - co-organizing and hosting open-air reading and research groups exploring land, memory, and power through texts in ecology, queer-feminism, Indigenous knowledge, political ecology, critical cartography, and artistic practice. Designed as a slow, reflective space for collective thought and dialogue (monthly gatherings).
- mapping margins - countermapping borders (3 august) - intervention, time is the new space, rotterdam.
-  The Active Image: Political Ecologies & Photographic Agency, part of group show, the sustainable darkroom, online.
- Tuin is the message, group show after artist in residence at NoR Rotterdam, 14-16 aug. included the site-responsive work “fallow forms”. 
- Kraut sessions, Volkskeuken, The Hague – ongoing collaborative sessions as part of artistic research duo somae, exploring fermentation as method and metaphor through community-based food practices.
- Anti-Class Residency, B32/Maastricht – B32, Maastricht (NL Participant in a collective, experimental peer-led residency focused on decentralised learning and community-based practice. Contributions included writing for the publication Anti-Class: A Carrier Bag of Practices (printed at the Jan van Eyck Academie), participation in community readings in Maastricht’s urban fallow spaces, the public book launch, and a performative dinner at Art au Centre/Liège. The residency brought together practitioners from diverse backgrounds to explore alternative pedagogies, collective care, and subversive forms of knowledge production.
- Kraut sessions, Stadsoase Spinozahof, The Hague – public sessions on fermentation, relational knowledge-making, and ecological attunement (ongoing).

2024
- exploring the memory of matter through papermaking, artistic research workshop, part of PACR/KABK/KC/Leiden University, the hague, 22 nov.
for (artist-) researchers working in & beyond the fields of Art, Design & Music.
- speculative mapping session as part of The Hmm Data Centre Tour, amsterdam, 9 nov.
- transactive memories- organic internet collaboration with Pamela Nelson, New York Textile Month, workshop, 26 sept. 
- the active image- political ecologies & photographic agency - online feature of The Sustainable Darkroom.
- grenzen & landschap - terra incognita & be like water, exhibition, participatory performance, provinciehuis zuid-holland, the hague 25 sept - 15 nov.
- flowing forward in closed cycles- be like water, exhibition, workshop, publication, West Paradise, the hague 1-31 july.
- the first impression on your skin, publication of my research paper included in the ‘matter does matter” exhibition of the KABK Lectorate Art, Theory and Practice, the hague - 27 june - 2 july.
- the cloud is a place on earth, exhibition, performance, publication, KABK 2024 graduation show the royal academy of art, the hague - 27 june - 2 july.
- closed cycles- be like water, exhibition, performance, workshop, publication, commisioned by NWO, closed cycles programme, egmond aan zee, 21-23 may.
- community kimchi, workshop/story telling, together with sophie krier & floris janssens, part of Urban Art Laboratories, spinozahof the hague, 20 april and 7 sept.
- 100% recycled time - essay part of the ecofeminist publication “a new world” of West the hague.


2023
- material research into paper making at Loes Schepens atelier, the hague, sept-may 2024.
- wie is hier de idioot? exhibition review published in tubelight magazine 124 and part of the exhibition- 25 jaar tubelight – kritieke kunstkritiek, tent, rotterdam (nl).
- terra incognita- exhibition part of the group exhibition ‘regenerate’, noorderlicht festival, groningen (nl), 23 juni - 10 december.
- second enlightenment, conversations and visual philosophy, ISVW.
- terra incognita - exhibition and conversations. part of ‘van bodem tot bord’, eetbaar park- permacultuurcentrum the hague (nl).
- the cameraless photographer - reading performance on mushroom radio, the hague.
- terra incognita, exhibition, workshop, reading performance and conversations.- part of ‘as above, so below’ exhibition, the greyspace in the middle, the hague.
- the activist is a white whale - exhibition at we do/are photography, international photoszene festival, cologne (de), 20-22 oct.


2022
- the activist is a white whale- part of  the exhibition of the fool group collective exhibition, motoki, cologne (de), 15 mar.
- the activist is a white whale. part of the publication ‘trickle - come, go, or appear slowly’. published with the support of the royal academy of art, the hague, 21 oct.

2021
- pr(e)ying eyes, writing about wildlife photography as a form of paparazzi intrusion, pubshlised online here.


education
- 2019 – 2024 bachelor of arts, royal academy of art, the hague
- 2022 permacultuur jaaropleiding, permacultuurcentrum, the hague
- 2002 -2007 master & bachelor of science ba, erasmus university, rotterdam