31.08.2025 — 01.03.2026
People sometimes say that we love animals because we do not fully understand them. The absence of a shared language allows space for us to project our own feelings onto them. Looking at the precarious state of the Dutch landscape, the needs of animals seem to play little part. But how do animals actually experience the pressure on their environment?
In the exhibition We Live Here Too, artists make the impact of human activity on animals tangible. All the animals given a voice through the artworks are native to the region surrounding the estate – from cows and kingfishers to dogs. Often through a shift in perspective: how does an animal perceive the changing landscape? And to what extent can silence be interpreted as consent?
We Live Here Too is an exhibition about the landscape shared by humans and animals, about language, and about the impossible attempt to fully grasp what it means to be an animal.
The EWUU Centre for Living Technologies has contributed to the group exhibition We Live Here Too at Buitenplaats Kasteel Wijlre, with the project MicroCodex.
Within this context, MicroCodex introduces a new voice: that of a microbe adapted to live in the toxic waters of the Silbersee in Bitterfeld-Wolfen, East Germany. Into its DNA, the line by poet Walt Whitman –“For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” has been encoded.