Feeling with the Fishes

Slippery un and untouchable. Fishes. Ever wished to hold a fish in your arms, caress it and show your love for him. They don’t invite us to touch and they are certainly no lovers of being caressed by humans. Their scales don’t allow us to interact with them in the way that we like to show our love. Although there are fishes that like to nibble on our skins to help those who suffer from eczema. If one person knows what animals like to experience it is Thijs de Zeeuw. His zoo enclosure designs are based on research for what the animals, that they will house, enjoy doing. He will come by and tell us all about his Oosterdok project (with The Ambassey of The North Sea) where he makes the Oosterdok a pleasant home for eels. Every month olfactory artist Frank Bloem curates a program where experts, artists, designers and scientists shift our perspectives on what we eat, drink, touch, inhale, secrete and smell. These so called "lower senses" are not only placed lower in our body but also were considered through history as lesser, more banal and not sophisticated. We think differently. Starting from a simple theme with a thought provoking question, we go on a journey and inviting people from different disciplines to discover the world that lies behind everyday phenomena. Frank Bloem is an artist who uses scent as his primary medium. He started his lab The Snifferoo in 2016 and creates scent art projects. From elephant scents for Artis Zoo to erotic pine scents for festival Into the great wide Open. He works with artist and museums and has a long term collaboration with The Embassy of the North Sea for who he made art projects and a perfume. For Mediamatic Frank has been active since 2017. From Collaborating on Odorama evenings with Caro Verbeek to giving scent and distillation workshops. Since 2019 he is the manager of the Aroma Lab that he set up together with Niklaus Metler. Thijs de Zeeuw is a Landscape architect and nature-optimist. He designs environments for both humans and non-humans to cohabit in. He dreams of multi-species societies in which humans regard animals as other persons just as we do with our fellow homo sapiens. Thijs de Zeeuw is trained as a landscape architect. He graduated at the Academy of Architecture in Amsterdam in 2011 on the ‘(un)conditional garden’, a garden which exhibits urban wildlife. Simultaneously he worked for H+N+S Landscape Architects where he designed on the typical Dutch landscape: dikes, polders, and nature development sites.