A collaboration with Zone2Source and the Environmental Humanities Centre Amsterdam exploring Amstelpark as a site of “living heritage”. Details below.
On the occasion of 1 year Zoop Amstelpark, which was launched on 4th of October 2025, we organize a series of events. On Thursday October 1 we invite various speakers to explore together with us if the Amstelpark heritage as a site of a former world exhibition on horticulture can become a place where we inquire into the ecological issues of our times.
Time Thursday Oktober 1 • 1 – 6.30 PM
Location: Zone2Source (het Glazen Huis, Amstelpark)
Language: English
The Amstelpark, designed for the international horticulture exhibition Floriade in 1972, was granted monumental status in 2022, as much of the original structure of the exhibition is still in place. In October 2025, Amstelpark became the first public Zoöp, a ‘cooperation of all life’ in which the interests of all living beings are actively represented in decision making. During this symposium, we will discuss what it means when a heritage site becomes a Zoöp – or, the other way around – when a Zoöp is also a heritage site?
Does the desire to preserve the park’s heritage support or hinder the process of giving all life a voice in the park and working towards multispecies justice? Could an alternative understanding of heritage – in which we include immaterial and living heritage – as a process of collective meaning-making that goes beyond divisions of culture and nature, provide new directions on how to bring these two designations together? Our central question is: can the heritage of the Amstelpark, as the location of the 1972 Floriade, become a learning ground for the ecological issues of our time?
The symposium consists of two panels: the first addresses the monument status of the Amstelpark and the history of the Floriade, and in the second panel, we look at alternative approaches to living heritage. Finally, together with our Speakers with the Living, we explore where the Monument and the Zoöp status of the Amstelpark intersect, how heritage gains contemporary relevance, and what the value of life is within heritage.
Participation is free. Register here.
Programme
13:00: doors open
13.15: welcome by Alice Smits (director Zone2Source)
13:20: introduction by Colin Sterling and Marilena Mela (moderators)
13:30-14:30: Amstelpark: From Floriade to Zoöp
13.30 -13.40: Amstelpark as a Living Monument by Joost Emmerik (landscape architect, Landscape Architecture at the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture)
13.40-13.50 Nature thinking in the design of Amstelpark Imke van Hellemondt (Historian of Landscape Architecture, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
13.50-14.30 debate moderated by Marilena Mela (assistant professor of Heritage Studies at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
14:30-16:00: Meet Ms. Buxus and the Rhododendrons
walk & talk through heritage sites in the Amstelpark
With Nicole de Rop (gardener municipality Amsterdam) and Alice Smits (Zone2Source)
16:00-17:00: Living Heritage in theory and practice
16.:00 – 16.10 Nature and culture interwoven. Lessons learned from park landscapes in the East of the Netherlands by Elyze Storms-Smeets (Special Professor of Regional History, Radboud University)
16.10 – 16.20 On making gasheritage in Groningen: between preservation and erasure by Janna oud Ammerveld (Critical Heritage Researcher, Utrecht University)
16.20 – 17:00 debate moderated by Colin Sterling (assistant professor Heritage, Museums and the Environment UvA)
17:00-17:30: Response and conclusions
Anne Jesuina de Andrade and Theun Karelse, Speakers with the Living of Zoöp Amstelpark
17:30- 18:30 drinks
Biographies
Marilena Mela is Assistant Professor of Heritage Studies at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and a board member of the Environmental Humanities Center. She is the author of Assembling the Archipelago: Heritage in Energy Transitions and Climate Action and was recently awarded an NWO Veni grant for her project Unearth, Re-earth. She is also editor at theJournal of European Landscapes and an associate of Boulouki, a collective working on traditional building and ecological knowledge in Greece.
Colin Sterling is Assistant Professor in Heritage, Museums and the Environment at the University of Amsterdam, where he teaches across heritage and memory, museum studies and artistic research. Colin’s research focuses on the political and ecological dimensions of heritage and museums in the past and the present. He is the author of Heritage, Photography, and the Affective Past (Routledge, 2020) and co-editor of Deterritorializing the Future: Heritage in, of and after the Anthropocene (Open Humanities Press, 2020). He is editor of the journal Museums & Social Issues.
Joost Emmerik is a garden and landscape architect. He also is head of the Master’s programme in Landscape Architecture at the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture, is a visiting lecturer at Technical University Delft and the Academy of Architecture Rotterdam and is a member of the Talent Building Committee of the Creative Industries Fund.
Imke van Hellemondt is a researcher and lecturer in Architectural History and the Designed Environment at the Faculty of Humanities, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her field of research is the history of Dutch ecological landscapes since the nineteenth century, with a focus on nature-culture relationships, the connection between design ideas and practice, and (international) professional networks. She also is an advisor for Nieuwe Instituut Rotterdam in the project Memory of the designed landscape, to improve landscape architecture archiving in the Netherlands.
Elyze Storm Smeets is a historical geographer and landscape historian, special professor of Regional History of Gelderland at Radboud University, and Coordinator of the university’s Heritage Hub. She is also senior heritage and landscape advisor at Gelders Genootschap
Janna oud Ammerveld works as a postdoctoral researcher in the Horizon PITCH project at Utrecht University (NL). Her research explores the nexus climate change, energy and heritage studies. She currently coordinates a curatorial intervention in the Groningen gaslands in co-creation with local stakeholders. In the intervention she bridges artistic practices, critical heritage studies and environmental humanities.
Anne de Andrade is a decolonial, anti-disciplinary artist of Northern Dutch and Afro-Brazilian descent and one of the Speakers with the Living for Zoöp Amstelpark. Their work moves between post-activism, multispecies justice, and somatic abolitionism, and explores the relationship between worldview, emotion, embodiment, relationship, and ecology. Through writing, music, voice, moving image, and performance, they attempt to expose the invisible socio-somatic dimensions of white ‘supremacy’ culture in order to heal individual and systemic wounds and find regenerative sources for transformation and power.
Theun Karelse is an artist who studied visual arts at the Sandberg Institute and part of FoAM, a dispersed group of transdisciplinary laboratories operating at the intersection of art, science, nature, and everyday life. He also is Speaker with the Living of Zoöp Amstelpark. He practices and supports ecosystem and landscape regeneration in Europe, India, and Africa. His outdoor studio consists of various gardens that serve as testing grounds for urban biodiversity, climate adaptation, and ancient knowledge systems. He is an active member of the Embassy of the Earth, part of the Future of the Delta team at the Embassy of the Northsea.
Alice Smits is the initiator and director/curator of Zone2Source, testing ground of art and ecology using the Amstelpark as a living lab for artistic research. She is also an independant researcher and writer on the topic of art, science and ecology and occasional publishes in magazines and catalogues.
