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Some Call It Love, Others Biodiversity

For U? 2026, Het Hof van Cartesius turns into a living ecosystem of sound, art, food and playful experimentation. As cities grow hotter, dense, they get less hospitable to many forms of life. Some Call It Love, Others Biodiversity explores how alternative forms of living can emerge from everyday practices and encounters: cooking, listening, making and moving together.

Expect workshops, installations, performances and shared food: (e-)waste transformed into artworks, hidden soundscapes of butterflies and mycelia brought into earshot, and bodies gathering around sound systems and stoves. Co-created with Creative Coding Utrecht, UP Utrecht, Stickit, PAO & TJOY, Creative Utrecht, Antenne and others, the programme makes space for joyful resistance and new collective rituals.

Here, multispecies coexistence is not a promise of harmony, but an ongoing, shared practice of living with difference. A form of love grounded in staying with friction and attuning to each other’s rhythms.


Some call it Love, Others Biodiversity

As part of Some Call it Love, Others Biodiversity, Creative Coding Utrecht presents a selection of artistic experiments that explore listening as a way of relating to other forms of life. Developed through CCU’s ongoing artist residency program, the works bring together local and international artists who investigate new alliances between humans, machines and other species. Featuring works by Nahun Saldaña, Yolanda Uriz and Sounak Das, developed during the Practices of Alliance and Zoop Connections residency programmes supported by Amarte fonds, EUNIC, Instituto Cervantes, Goethe Institut and Culture Moves Europe.

The Boomtoren and its surrounding gardens become a testing ground for multispecies encounters. Installations, sound performances and collective rituals invite visitors to tune into rhythms that often escape human perception: the vibrations of plants, the activity of fungi, the movements of butterflies and the electronic pulses of machines. Listening becomes an act of love: of paying attention, of being affected by others and of making space for forms of life we do not always know how to hear.

⁠A Tavola!

Get a taste of the varied food cultures, (hi)stories, and hidden knowledges of the Werkspoorkwartier. At De Loods, A Tavola! brings people together around the table to eat, share stories, exchange knowledge and make things together. Food becomes a language of care: connecting people, places and histories, while reminding us of our entanglement with the more-than-human worlds that sustain us.

The program presents the outcomes of community-driven processes in the neighbourhood, emerging from interdisciplinary collaborations between Creative Coding Utrecht, the University of Twente, artist Sunjoo Lee and PAO & TJOY, Renske Versluijs (Creatiev Utrecht) and chefs and artists from Werkspoorkwartier. Through practices such as fermentation, pickling and claying, and through collecting and sharing stories, recipes and memories, these projects create spaces where knowledge is exchanged and new stories can take root.

During U?, a shared library of local stories, recipes and possible futures will open in De Loods. Like a table, it is open to everyone: a place to bring something, exchange something and contribute to an evolving commons. 

Litter Bugs

Maakplaats UP and Stickit join forces to organise a program that challenges our relationships to waste. With Litter Bugs, artist Henk Loorbach invites visitors to give new life to discarded plastics and overlooked objects. The project playfully shifts our perspective on the materials around us, asking us to consider the lives and environments entangled with our consumption. Upcycling becomes as a medium for storytelling, art, and new multispecies connections. Alongside the showcase, Stickit presents a zine about these small invented species.

The terrain of UP also becomes a stage for a program of performances and music, co-created with makers and communities from the Hof van Cartesius. Through experimental sounds, live coding and more, the program brings hidden ecosystems to life. Other species become companions in listening and making, opening up new ways of imagining our relationships with the worlds around us. 

Links: https://henkloorbach.nl/work/litterbugs/