MIARD presents 2022 graduate exhibition Underfoot and reaching into the light

July 7–10, 2022

The Piet Zwart Institute’s Master Interior Architecture: Research + Design class of 2022 cordially invites you to the exhibition Underfoot and reaching into the light, which will feature their year-end projects.

In The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins [1], Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing imagines “other ways of making worlds,” histories told from different points of view and she investigates stories with unexpected protagonists. The chapter of the book titled The Life of the Forest, an important reference for the participants of MIARD and their research, begins with a passage that encapsulates Tsing’s reasoning while creating an ethereal and mystified image: “To walk attentively through a forest, even a damaged one, is to be caught by the abundance of life: ancient and new; underfoot and reaching into the light.” The students of MIARD are exploring this exact condition by looking at it through their own personal prisms informed by a strong interest in alternative ways of spatializing research.

In order to present a wide range of perspectives on space, the space around, below, and above us, 13 installations take over the exhibition, workshop, and liminal spaces of Rotterdam’s HuidenClub (a former tannery now converted into a cultural center and artist studios).

This graduation show explores a variety of topics, including the renegotiation of one’s own personal narratives that form one’s identity, contemporary technology and the issues it raises, sharp views at nature and resource extraction, as well as the exploration of materials.

The students, who comprise a polyphonic group of artists, architects, and designers, have been working side by side in the MIARD studios for the past two years. They have constructed their projects through a process of speaking and exchanging that is evident throughout the exhibition.

Studies that emphasize nature and interspecies relationships are offered with practices that use intimate moments as a way to traverse the collective experience. Studies on technology and its potential are combined with in-depth investigations of materials, their properties, capabilities, and roles in our natural and urban environments.

The invisible layers of knowledge, protocols, and misconceptions that permeate most facets of our lives and that significantly influence how we perceive the world are put on display underneath our feet and reaching into the light.

[1] Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2015)

General opening hours: Friday to Sunday, 11am–6pm
Public transport: Tram 8 Spangen via Rotterdam Centraal & Beurs

Graduation Project Supervisors: Golnar Abbasi, Kris Dittel, Ephraim Joris, Federico Martelli
Graduation Project Chair: Alex Augusto Suárez
External Expert: Nasim Razavian
Project Manager: Eva Garibaldi
Technical Support: Stanley van der Meer, Matthias Hurtl
Graphic Designer: The PZI Archipelago (Urte Baranauskaite, Oliver Doe, Shiila Infriccioli)