TRAVELLING INTERVENTION

Collaboration and involvement is at the heart of the Shaping Patterns project. A manifestation of this is our shared travelling intervention.

The intervention has travelled from Villa Zebra – Children’s Museum, Rotterdam, to Kunsten – Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg, to Plato – City Gallery of Contemporary Art in Ostrava, to Yellow Brick – Institution of Contemporary Art in Athens, and it has now returned to Villa Zebra. More than 400 children have been involved in the intervention.

Development – Shaping Matters

Spatial designer Lieke van der Meer, and the children of grades 5, 6, and 7 from De Schalm primary school in Rotterdam collaboratively developed a travelling art intervention. This intervention is designed to travel in a wooden box measuring only 50 x 50 x 100 cm. Our goal was to create a compact intervention with a significant impact.

The intervention uses art to encourage children and adults to think about their living environment, the future, and our influence on it. Its travelling nature emphasizes our interconnectedness: climate issues affect everyone, but we are not alone in searching for solutions.

For the development and execution of the intervention, Villa Zebra partnered with spatial designer Lieke van der Meer of Studio Muis. Lieke specializes in working in public spaces, finding sustainable solutions, and conducting research in collaboration with local communities. Villa Zebra was familiar with her work from the Zebra Machine project, where she created a machine that transformed entire streets into zebra crossings with chalk paint, enabling people to interact with public spaces in surprising ways.

Villa Zebra also involved De Schalm primary school in Rotterdam. Located on a peninsula in the Maas River, surrounded by ports and urban development, the school offered an environment that resonated well with the students’ experiences. The intervention was designed to be a tool for children to ask questions, collaboratively find solutions, play, and pass on challenges to children in other countries where the intervention would travel.

Collaborative Research and Design

During the process, the children worked with Lieke to explore how different floor plans function, what they already knew about global warming, and what is essential for the future. In a series of lessons, they imagined their future homes and the spaces between those homes. This led to large floor plans, which became the foundation for Lieke’s further design work.

In the next phase, the students conducted material research on new, sustainable building materials. Examples included wool, seaweed, denim, linoleum, and fungi. The origins, scents, and colors of these materials stimulated their imagination and played a key role in the creative process. After constructing and testing the intervention, the children brainstormed ways for others to interact with it and even wrote letters to the next group of children who would work with it.

The entire development process was an intensive collaboration, with children playing a central role. The focus on materials and the themes that emerged during play inspired the name: Shaping Matters.

An Intervention That Keeps Travelling

The intervention is adaptable to various environments, allowing it to continually evolve. Feedback from new users consistently contributes to its improvement. During its journey through Europe, as part of the Shaping Patterns partnership, Museum Kunsten in Aalborg collaborated with Utzon to develop new forms using mycelium boards.

After its European tour, the intervention returned to Villa Zebra, where it is now used in the 1 km ik program. This initiative encourages children to think about what they would like to change within a kilometer of their homes. The intervention is also featured during Rotterdam’s Climate Week.