Attention, Care, and Time: Insights from Zoöp Connections

ELIA's new Green Team intern Anna Lina Litz reports on what happens when artists are encouraged to immerse themselves in ecological questions for a week-long residency.  

Before I joined ELIA's Green Team this month, I studied Environmental Humanities at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich and researched the intersections of art and ecology. During fieldwork in Amsterdam, I interviewed artists and designers whose work includes collaboration with other lifeforms: mushrooms, chickens, plants, and even the lions and elephants who live in the ARTIS Zoo in Amsterdam. This is how I first learned about the Zoöp model.  

The word Zoöp is a portmanteau of Greek zoë, “life” and “cooperation”. The Zoöp model is a practical approach for helping organisations to act in the interest of all life: not just the human, but also the nonhuman stakeholders affected by the organisations actions. To this end, the organisation is paired with a specially trained ‘speaker for the living’, who represents the interests of these nonhuman stakeholders. Founded and coordinated by artists, the ‘Zoönomic Institute’ recognises the crucial importance of artistic research and practice when it comes to shifting away from the established story of (Western) human domination over the rest of nature. That is why they partnered with EUNIC  (EU National Institutes for Culture) to organise Zoöp Connections, a series of mini-residencies at five established Zoöps, each paired with a European cultural institute. Zoöp Nieuwe Instituut, for example, worked with Institut français NL, and Zoöp de Ceuvel with the Goethe-Institut Niederlande.   

On 12 November, I attended the closing event of this series, where artists, hosts and organisers shared insights and new practices from the residencies. Zoöp founder Klaas Koutenbrouwer reminded us that humans can be a useful species, if they choose to be. Our function in the ecosystem is a bit like that of beavers, building and shaping habitats for both ourselves and other species to thrive in. “No matter where you are, you are in the middle of ecological questions”, he said. In practice, addressing these questions means assessing whether an organisation’s structures are life-supporting or not, and adjusting them where necessary. Practically, this has looked like turning the Nieuwe Instituut’s parking lot into a garden, or offering the swan who lives around Zoöp de Ceuvel a nesting space instead of chasing it away. 

But what actually happens when artists get to immerse themselves in the ecological questions of an organisation for a week? Some of the key aspects touched on by artists and hosts were attention, care and time. Paying close attention to the Zoöp’s ecosystem, guided by its speaker for the living, the artist develops a different way of seeing: Which plants and animals are part of the organisation’s ecosystem? What are their names? What do they need? How do they relate to each other?  

Art historian Estelle Zhong Mengual,  resident at Nieuwe Instituut, described this in her text Shared Meaningfulness: “The word meaningful is one of my favorite words. Meaningful binds together the quality of being important and the quality of having meaning until they become inseparable.” Making small accommodating gestures towards other creatures expands the world with meaningfulness: “Suddenly, you enter a world where things are not what they seem to be. This sand pile is not just a sand pile. It means life for burying bees. This ladder by the canal is not just a ladder. It means home for tube worms.” The residency helped her develop this kind of attention not just in the forest or by the ocean, but also in the everyday life of the city.  

Struan Campbell, who works at the British Council and partnered with Zoöp Kunstfort Vijfhuizen to host artist Ashley Holmes, described the residency period as a transformative experience of care: “When we started, I was concerned that the Zoöp would be an artistic concept that would be hard to grasp. I was thinking, what have we signed up for? But during the week, we came through a whole process to a new understanding that we have to take care of each other and of non-human forms of living, that we are in communication with them. I think that has made me really slow down.”    

Werner de Valk from Zoöp Creative Coding Utrecht, who worked with the Instituto Cervantes hosting artist Yolanda Uriz Elizalde, also reflected on the theme of time: One week was perhaps too short to let the collaboration unfold fully, and importantly, the natural world’s timing doesn’t comply with our strict and busy calendars. The flowers in Creative Coding’s garden, which the artist needed for her exploration of chemical signalling and plant communication, had not yet started to bloom. Despite this practical lack of time, all of the residencies planted seeds for future collaborations, between artists, cultural institutions and zoöps.  

What does all this have to do with ELIA and the Green Team? One of ELIA’s core values is an active culture of care: “Actively seeking solutions to global challenges, we are committed to taking responsibility for our environment and each other.” When it comes to taking care of our environment, ELIA is committed to SHIFT eco-certification for cultural networks, which we are currently finalising for 2025. Beyond this, the Arts & Ecology Community Hub and Working Group have formed this year to share best practices, learnings, and experiences on climate action across the network. The insights from the Zoöp Connections closing event have once again convinced me that the arts in themselves are crucial for finding ways out of our climate and ecological crises, because they can inspire and inform a culture of care beyond the human.