Elevate - Australia
Elevate
The Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands (Australia) elevates distinctive cultural projects that connect the two nations with the critical issues that affect our lives and our planet through innovative, original, and sustainable practice.
Our cultural policy believes that art has the power to reach people personally, establishes a deeper understanding and brings its unique ability to elevate an affect response. If contemporary practice can elevate the narrative, initiate conversation, or mobilize action then we have your full attention.
We elevate cultural activities across design and visual arts, the performing arts and interdisciplinary arts that are themed on sustainability, the environment, colonization, and equity that bring attention to social and political spheres and that connect the Netherlands and Australia.
What is important?
The circular economy is becoming an integral part of society and a way of life. By collaborating, the Netherlands and Australia elevate each other in developing sustainable outcomes that brings global benefits.
Now that climate change is beginning to have an even stronger impact than we first realized, people’s knowledge and capacity to change their habits are even more crucial.
We seek to elevate a global conversation about climate change, one Dutch-Australian collaboration at a time.
By supporting the community that art creates, we seek to build consensus, the will to effect change and the inspiration to act to protect the Earth.
CASE STUDY Soils
THE SOILS PROJECT
2023 – 2025 Tarrawarra Museum of Art (Australia) – Van Abbemuseum (Netherlands) – Struggles for Sovereignty (Indonesia)
The Soils Project brings together thirteen practitioners and collectives from Australia, the Netherlands and Indonesia to explore the complex and diverse relationships between environmental change and colonisation.
The exhibition is the iteration of an ongoing research-based experimental project developed in collaboration with leading contemporary arts museum the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, Netherlands and Struggles for Sovereignty, a collective based in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. The Soils Project arises from specific and situated practices that each of the participants and artists brings to their understanding of soil, as both metaphor and matter. The project brings together:
* The complex and diverse relationships between environmental change and colonisation within the Netherlands, Indonesia, and Australia.
* The deep histories of each location, the multiplicity of landscapes and environments, and the diverse impact of farming, mining, plantations, colonisations and global industries on cultural heritage, land management and traditional knowledges.
* Recognition that the institutions involved (Van Abbemuseum and TarraWarrra) have histories that are embedded in Western modernity and coloniality.
EMBASSY OF THE NORTH SEA
In 2021 the Embassy of the North Seas made an impactful contribution to Biennale of Sydney with their projection and sound Installation Ghost Reef (2020-ongoing) a project that seeks to give representation to the North Sea.
The Embassy of the North Sea, founded in The Hague in 2018, listens to and involves the voices of plants, animals, microbes, and people in and around the North Sea. Founded on the principle that the sea owns itself, the Embassy makes political space for sea-emancipation through connection, imagination, and representation. We plotted a route through to 2030, firstly learning to listen to the sea before we learn to speak with it. Finally, we will negotiate on behalf of the North Sea and all the life that it encapsulates.
Today’s most pressing ecological and technological issues transcend borders and species, yet we mostly approach them from the nation-state perspective. For example, the largest mass extinction has been going on for sixty-five million years, but which country feels responsible for it? Countries are only accountable to one another, and their politicians only accountable to their electors, rather than to all life under threat. The Embassy of the North Seas made a profound impact to Australia during its visit, expanding its reach with workshops for children and co-operations with Australian universities.
Our cultural policy believes that art has the power to reach people personally, establishes a deeper understanding and brings its unique ability to elevate an affect response. If contemporary practice can elevate the narrative, initiate conversation, or mobilize action then we have your full attention.
We elevate cultural activities across design and visual arts, the performing arts and interdisciplinary arts that are themed on sustainability, the environment, colonization, and equity that bring attention to social and political spheres and that connect the Netherlands and Australia.
What is important?
The circular economy is becoming an integral part of society and a way of life. By collaborating, the Netherlands and Australia elevate each other in developing sustainable outcomes that brings global benefits.
Now that climate change is beginning to have an even stronger impact than we first realized, people’s knowledge and capacity to change their habits are even more crucial.
We seek to elevate a global conversation about climate change, one Dutch-Australian collaboration at a time.
By supporting the community that art creates, we seek to build consensus, the will to effect change and the inspiration to act to protect the Earth.
CASE STUDY Soils
THE SOILS PROJECT
2023 – 2025 Tarrawarra Museum of Art (Australia) – Van Abbemuseum (Netherlands) – Struggles for Sovereignty (Indonesia)
The Soils Project brings together thirteen practitioners and collectives from Australia, the Netherlands and Indonesia to explore the complex and diverse relationships between environmental change and colonisation.
The exhibition is the iteration of an ongoing research-based experimental project developed in collaboration with leading contemporary arts museum the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, Netherlands and Struggles for Sovereignty, a collective based in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. The Soils Project arises from specific and situated practices that each of the participants and artists brings to their understanding of soil, as both metaphor and matter. The project brings together:
* The complex and diverse relationships between environmental change and colonisation within the Netherlands, Indonesia, and Australia.
* The deep histories of each location, the multiplicity of landscapes and environments, and the diverse impact of farming, mining, plantations, colonisations and global industries on cultural heritage, land management and traditional knowledges.
* Recognition that the institutions involved (Van Abbemuseum and TarraWarrra) have histories that are embedded in Western modernity and coloniality.
EMBASSY OF THE NORTH SEA
In 2021 the Embassy of the North Seas made an impactful contribution to Biennale of Sydney with their projection and sound Installation Ghost Reef (2020-ongoing) a project that seeks to give representation to the North Sea.
The Embassy of the North Sea, founded in The Hague in 2018, listens to and involves the voices of plants, animals, microbes, and people in and around the North Sea. Founded on the principle that the sea owns itself, the Embassy makes political space for sea-emancipation through connection, imagination, and representation. We plotted a route through to 2030, firstly learning to listen to the sea before we learn to speak with it. Finally, we will negotiate on behalf of the North Sea and all the life that it encapsulates.
Today’s most pressing ecological and technological issues transcend borders and species, yet we mostly approach them from the nation-state perspective. For example, the largest mass extinction has been going on for sixty-five million years, but which country feels responsible for it? Countries are only accountable to one another, and their politicians only accountable to their electors, rather than to all life under threat. The Embassy of the North Seas made a profound impact to Australia during its visit, expanding its reach with workshops for children and co-operations with Australian universities.