Anne Diestelkamp
cultural programmer, artistic researcher/ editor and translator
The Perennial Reading Group reconvened: On Friday November 14 we gathered at Buurtwerkplaats Noorderhof to read from Derek Jarman’s memoir Modern Nature. In 1986, after learning of his HIV diagnosis, Jarman began cultivating a garden around his cottage on the desolate shingle shores of Dungeness. „The boundaries of my garden are the horizon“, Jarman writes in Modern Nature. The diary, poetic and unapologetic, chronicles his efforts to grow plants amidst sea-spray and wind, while reflecting on his life – his childhood, his years as a young gay man in the 1960s, and his career as a filmmaker, artist, and writer.
The Perennial Reading Group is a nomadic, ongoing gathering for those drawn to sharing plant wisdom—eco-feminists, gardeners, cross-pollinators, and all who feel kinship with the more-than-human world. We come together to read books that sharpen and expand these commitments. The Perennial Reading Group meets up irregularly and unpredictably.
Workshop
Zakia el Abodi & Anne Diestelkamp
I Can Change the World With My Two Hands, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
On Sunday, October 26th we gathered in the garden of I Can Change the World With My Two Hands in Amsterdam to dive into the depths of burdock (Arctium lappa). Burdock is a biennial plant known for its deep taproot, traditionally used in herbal medicine to support liver function, detoxification, and skin health. As the colder season approaches in Amsterdam, the energy of the natural world begins to turn inward. Plants slow their growth above ground, drawing their strength down into their roots — storing nourishment and preparing for the stillness ahead. This season invites us to do the same: to ground ourselves, conserve energy, and tend to what supports us at the deepest levels. Root medicines become especially important now, offering warmth and connection to the steady rhythms of the earth.
During the gathering, we collectively harvested the roots, drew the leaves and seeds, tasted the root, shared knowledge about the plant’s medicinal qualities, and cooked a broth made from burdock root and other gut-healing weeds.
Workshop
Zakia el Abodi & Anne Diestelkamp
Buurtwerkplaats Noorderhof, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
2025
Mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris) is a plant long revered for its gentle psychoactive properties. Known to deepen the connection with the subconscious, it offers a gateway into the rich terrain of our dream world. On September 28, 2025, we carried out a collective daydream ritual in the garden of the Four Siblings Collective. Guided by artist and herbalist Zakia el Abodi, we explored the medicinal properties of mugwort, daydreamt together and reflected on dreaming as a portal into more-than-human worlds.
Workshop
masharu
Buurtwerkplaats Noorderhof, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
2025
Geophagy—the practice of eating earth and earth-like substances, like clay and chalk—is an ancient practice that continues in many cultures. For years, the artist masharu has been collecting edible earth from around the world. They established the Museum of Edible Earth in 2016, which asks: What lies behind earth-eating traditions? Where does edible earth come from? What are its potential benefits and risks? And what kind of relationship are we forming—with the environment and with more-than-human worlds—through the act of eating earth?
On September 21 we gathered for a soil tasting in the garden of the FourSiblings Collective at Buurtwerkplaats Noorderhof. Participants got the chance to taste clay, soil, and human-made compost, and to engage with earth in a rich, multi-sensory experience.
Collective Reading
Buurtwerkplaats Noorderhof, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
2025
On September 5, 2025, we gathered in the garden of the Four Siblings to collectively read from 'The Honorable Harvest‘ and other chapters of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass
The Perennial Reading Group is a nomadic, ongoing gathering for those drawn to sharing plant wisdom—eco-feminists, gardeners, cross-pollinators, and all who feel kinship with the more-than-human world. We come together to read books that sharpen and expand these commitments. The Perennial Reading Group meets up irregularly and unpredictably.
Culinary Intervention
Paula Erstmann
Trinkpavillon Bad-Godesberg, Bonn, Germany
As part of VIDEONALE.20 – Festival for video and time-based arts
2025
Since 1969, the Trinkpavillon in Bonn-Bad Godesberg has been serving healing water from the Kurfürstenquelle. On the opening weekend of VIDEONALE.20, artist Paula Erstmann invited guests to a communal dinner on the pavilion terrace, offering everything from a healing water aperitif to locally foraged wild herb pestos.
Paula Erstmann works primarily with food as an artistic medium. Her performances, menus, and edible installations explore the social and cultural contexts of the ingredients she uses, functioning as artistic research at the intersection of art and everyday life. The Berlin-based artist’s culinary practice opens both sensory and social spaces. Through her work and the act of shared dining, she dissolves distance and creates a space for dialogue.
📷 Jo Hempel
Physical Introduction
When You Whistle, It Makes Air Come Out
Maryna Makarenko
Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany
As part of VIDEONALE.20 – Festival for video and time-based arts
2025
When You Whistle, It Makes Air Come Out. Torfs’ installation, whose rhythm is determined by the sound of her own breath, is based on the studies of Swiss psychologist Piaget on children’s understanding of cause and effect. The children’s surprising responses to questions such as “Where does the wind come from?” appear as text in an old lightbox.
📷 Jo Hempel
Performance
Mark Bain
Trinkpavillon Bad-Godesberg, Bonn, Germany
As part of VIDEONALE.20 – Festival for video and time-based arts
2025
Since the late 1990s, Mark Bain has been investigating the vibrations of buildings and their material properties, using sound waves that often lie below the threshold of perception. In his sound works, these waves function like an invisible object that the audience can physically feel. These projects grew out of Bain’s research on the relationship between the human body’s resonant frequency and architecture, conducted as part of his dissertation at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Bain is fascinated by unique spaces and architectures, and by the ways different materials produce sound. Like a musical instrument, buildings come in different shapes, sizes, and materials, all of which shape how sound waves behave.
Bain himself describes his sound performances as a “soundbath.” For the opening of VIDEONALE.20, my colleagues Annette Ziegert, Tasja Langenbach, and I invited the audience to experience a soundbath in the Bad Godesberg drinking pavilion, where the body is enveloped like a tangible sound sculpture. The site has a long history: a healing spring, the Kurfürstenquelle, was drilled here in 1962, and in 1969/70 a cubic pavilion was built, which has since served as a place for serving its healing waters.
📷 Jo Hempel
Collective Reading and Talk
Stéphanie Lagarde und Beatrice Gibson, moderiert von Anna Holms
Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany
As part of VIDEONALE.20 – Festival for video and time-based arts
2025
In their video works, artists Beatrice Gibson and Stéphanie Lagarde explore themes of parenthood and self-sacrifice. In a participatory reading, we engaged with excerpts from Annie Ernaux’s novel A Frozen Woman.
📷 Jo Hempel and David Ertl
Collective Reading and Talk
Ida Kammerloch, Stephan Panhans & Andrea Winkler
Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany
As part of VIDEONALE.20 – Festival for video and time-based arts
2025
In the video work Anima Overdrive by Stefan Panhans & Andrea Winkler, a performer raps about the exhausting cycle of deliveries — from physical goods to abstract concepts. In Aren’t you afraid to swing on Russian swings?, Ida Kammerloch tells the story of her grandfather and the shuttle trade between Russia and China. In a participatory reading, we brought these two works into resonance with excerpts from Heike Geißler’s novel Saisonarbeit (Seasonal Associate), in which the author writes about her work for Amazon and the accompanying exhaustion and alienation.
📷 Jo Hempel and David Ertl
Conversation in three chapters
Philipp Guffler, Ana María Millán, Marcel Odenbach und Yan Wai Yin
Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany
As part of VIDEONALE.20 – Festival for video and time-based arts
2025
Since the emergence of video art in the 1960s, artists have used the medium of video as a means of critically addressing power structures — using artistic strategies that are subversive, resistant, and resilient in the face of the oppression of people and their diversity. Many of the works presented at VIDEONALE.20 explore the social, political, and ecological forces to which human and non-human subjects are involuntarily exposed, and how they endure them. The medium of video thus becomes an instrument of revelation and preservation — but also of world-making — and in doing so becomes itself an expression of resilience.
In three discussion rounds, VIDEONALE.20 artists talk about the phenomenon of endurance in their work.
Chapter 1: Marcel Odenbach and Yan Wai Yin in conversation with Kathrin Jentjens
Ständig auf dem Sprung sein (Constantly on the Move) by Marcel Odenbach and Muted Bridges by Yan Wai Yin address the consequences of authoritarian systems that lead to migration or silence. In a collage of produced and found footage, Odenbach explores the phenomenon of (forced) departure and perpetual movement. In a diary-like video documentation, Yan Wai Yin indirectly preserves the 2019/20 protest movement in Hong Kong against China’s political influence.
Chapter 2: Philipp Gufler in conversation with Kat Lawinia Gorska
A jet of water is aimed at the heart area of a naked body that stands firm: in The Beginning of Identification, and its End, Philipp Gufler uses historical footage and staged moving images to explore the successful history of emancipation for gender diversity and the visibility of queer bodies. He contrasts this with contemporary homonationalism and its instrumentalization of LGBTQ+ emancipation movements for anti-Muslim racism and exclusion.
Chapter 3: Ana María Millán and Nieves de la Fuente Gutiérrez
In her work, Ana María Millán deals with the exploitation of resources and its impact on the ecosystem. In Desert — a combination of computer simulation and video game — players move from the mining areas near Cali, Colombia, into a barren desert coated in oil, eventually beginning to immerse themselves in it. In her conversation with curator Nieves de la Fuente Gutiérrez, Millán discusses the potential of gaming as a power-critical tool for creating worlds.
📷 Jo Hempel