APRiCot Garden 2025

APRiCot Garden is envisioned as an annual event bringing together research trajectories by alumni and practitioners from the wider Dutch Art Institute community. 

At this critical juncture of the interlocking planetary crisis, this inaugural edition’s loose point of departure is a recognition that artists might be carriers of profound healing—not the individualized, commodified self-optimization of the spiritual industrial complex, but healing as a transversal epistemic and political project, where difference, mutual aid and regenerative knowledge practice becomes a generative condition of collective renewal. This APRiCot Garden thus invokes a warm, pulsating mycorrhizal network of artistic intelligence—one that breathes, transforms, and perpetually exceeds the calculative boundaries of knowledge “production” constrained by capital’s technologies of extractive, predictive, statistical knowing. 

This year’s event is dedicated to affirming gathering as a form of experimental research methodology. Open inquiry, writerly experimentation, ritual, performance, lecture, embodied practice, close readings, and theoretical intervention will intertwine throughout the duration of 12 hours. 

Rather than showcasing polished conclusions, the day’s sessions embrace Incomplete Circuits where participants explicitly identify the gaps and uncertainties in their current research and invite collective engagement with these unresolved spaces. The gathering builds upon the premise of Process Exposition by asking participants to foreground not just their research but their approaches to research itself—revealing the scaffolding that typically remains hidden. Moving beyond purely presentational, textual and verbal exchanges, the gathering incorporates Sensate Knowing through movement and sensory engagement. The event also reimagines Documentation as Process, tracing methodological evolution and transformations in thinking. 

The rhizomatic trace and curatorial afterscore that emerge become a soft incipience for the following edition, allowing for the growth of the research garden from one year to another. This regenerative approach, which allows for unexpected cross-pollinations and ecological succession that resist domestication, recognizes that knowledge otherwise—knowledge beyond the dominant epistemologies of extraction—requires not just alternative content but attentive and regenerative conditions of growth.

With student-alumni: Alaa Abu Asad, Bethany Crawford, Lucas Lugarinho, Dina A. Mohammed, Clara Saito, Yoeri Guépin, Raffia Li, Simon(e) van Saarloos, Taka Taka, and Yen Noh & Tutor-alumni: Ramon Amaro, Nikita Dhawan, Antonia Majaca, The Otolith Group: Kodwo Eshun & Anjalika Sagar, Emily Pethick, and Ashkan Sepahvand.

Conceptualized and curated by Antonia Majaca with programing developed in collaboration with Bethany Crawford.

Side program: screenings, teach-outs, food, drinks and dance with, among others, Philippa Driest (KIOSK Rotterdam), Kastė Šeškevičiūtė and Marika Vanderkraats.

APRiCot Garden as a future oriented, ongoing project was initiated by Gabriëlle Schleijpen, artistic director and head of program, and organized and produced by DAI: Lauren Alexander & Hanna Rullmann (communication design), Giulia Crispiani (publishing), Peter Sattler (technical coordination), Jacq van de Spek (logistics) and Corine van der Wal (bookkeeping).

APRiCot Garden 2025 is funded by ArtEZ University of the Arts.