Performative Lecture

Collaborative Research

This project, with International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IBAR) and Design Academy Eindhoven (DAE), identified Dutch stabilization policies as structural constraints, reframed the challenge from control to adaptation, and developed an alternative stance of rewilding landscapes. Developed for and presented to the Municipality of Eindhoven.

In The Invention of Rivers, Dilip Da Cunha challenges the cartographic separation of land and water, proposing instead that all water bodies are open fields of wetness permeating the landscape.

Formed through the interactions of wind, water, sand, and time, dunes exemplify this fluid interdependence. These shifting terrains blur the boundaries between land and sea, filtering and collecting water through subterranean systems that sustain biodiversity. Fluid Spaces explores this entanglement and the impossibility of separating these elements.

Modernist ecological planning, driven by a desire for control, seeks to stabilise dunes, paradoxically threatening the very ecosystems it aims to protect. In the Netherlands, long-term dune stabilisation has reduced natural dynamics, stifling biodiversity and diminishing the dunes’ capacity to evolve and collect water.

Our installation advocates for the rewilding of dunes, recognising fluidity as a condition to be restored rather than resisted. Embracing a mode of “Becoming Mud,” we propose an open, adaptive model of ecological coexistence that resists mechanistic ideals of stability and control.

In collaboration with
Design Academy Eindhoven
International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam