Leaky Turns: Stories from Amsterdam’s Waterlands

Müge Yilmaz

Drawing from her research on salinization and her long-standing relationship with water, Müge Yilmaz reflects on pollution, salt-loving plants, and the importance of understanding water not just as a resource, but as a living presence shaped by – and responding to – human and non-human forces. In her work with the collective 4Siblings on a semi-urban, semi-wild plot in Amsterdam, they explore growing food and engaging with ecology through direct, embodied experience and praxis, rather than solely relying on theory. Born in Istanbul, Müge Yılmaz lives and works in Amsterdam. Her research and artistic practice presents speculations influenced by feminist science fiction and proposes future narratives through installation, performance and photography. She has been a resident at Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, a researcher at Rietveld Academie, is a co-founder of 4Siblings collective and is the admin of @feministcifi.

President Allendelaan 3, Amsterdam

Listen alongside Müge Yilmaz to notice the presence of water, and its movement all around you.

Anne Dessing

In her teaching project with students from Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Anne Dessing focussed on drawing water. She reflects on how the fluid and elusive nature of water invites new ways of perceiving, representing, and understanding it—not as static, blue shapes on a map, but as an omnipresent, connective, and ever-changing phenomenon. Anne Dessing is a Dutch architect. Her practice, Studio Anne Dessing, operates at the intersections of art, research and architecture. She researches architecture through exhibitions, installations, drawings, models, interiors and (temporary) buildings. She uses the discipline’s powerful representational techniques as tools to understand societies as complex aesthetic systems.

Veemkade 1226, Amsterdam

Listen alongside Anne Dessing to feel the ground under your feet; read the place you’re in.

Radna Rumping

Following a short excerpt reading from her text Shaky Ground, Stubborn Material, Radna Rumping reflects on floating gardens in Amsterdam as poetic, semi-public spaces that blur the boundaries between land and water, control and instability, imagination and reality. She explores how such spaces invite us to dwell with uncertainty and reconsider dominant structures by engaging with affect, material presence, and the legacies of countercultural practices. Radna Rumping is a curator, artist and advisor on contemporary art and culture. Her work involves public space, radio broadcasting, experimental archiving practices, ways of gathering and conditions of (in)visibility.