On Friday 10 July, 8PM, we welcome you at Onomatopee's cultuurhuis to experience multiple new exhibitions, to engage the criticality and creativity of many voices hosted and to grab a drink with us. From hybrid anthropogenic creatures to a selection of critical everyday design essays, and from an on- and offline investigation into public space to a poster project that questions the poster as a medium in our ever-more digital era. In other words: there is a lot to explore, examine, discuss, and reflect upon at Onomatopee “as usual”.

We follow the regulations in order to keep it safe for everyone visiting our exhibitions and bookshop.

We present:

Onomatopee 186 - CriticALL!

Onomatopee 190.2 - Meeting Grounds goes online

Onomatopee 185.2 - Residency For The People Quarantine sessions

Onomatopee 191 - Post - the poster

Onomatopee 188 - Bestario of anthropogenic creatures

Onomatopee Z0026 - 'Est pas une

For this event, we recommend tuning into Instagram Live via a laptop or computer screen for the best experience. 

For our final writing workout will be looking at the themes of: escapism, becoming the walk and the emptiness of surrounding spaces

This fourth writing exercise combines routes of escapism to position oneself in an unfamiliar environment. Quiet streets and vacant landscapes offer a “blank canvas” of un-interrupted material. Through scenes of unknown streets, the absence of human activity invites opportunity to imagine spatial scenarios. During lockdown increased indoor activity challenges empty public spaces. 

Gorleston-on-sea has experienced the lockdown of its community but welcomed the acts of nature that have taken over its high street, residential arenas and vast open beach landscapes. 

As an invitation to engage in this environment, this writing workout will take you on a video walk through the lockdown landscape of Gorleston-on-sea. As a way to explore a new form of navigation as we aim to familiarise ourselves with the environment on a more personal level whilst simultaneously challenging our ideas of public and private.

How do we involve and understand a landscape for the first time and how does this differ to the following times we experience it? 

What are the effects of experiencing a new landscape for the first time via the platform of a screen? 

Join us for the Reading Room, a reading space where we collectively listen to an audio work/podcast/video together before discussing the topics around public and private space.

For this session we will be listening to: Space 10 Imagine podcast - Sharing is Caring - Redefining home: investigating shared spatial living structures

You can find the podcast here. 
https://space10.com/imagine-podcast-episode-4-sharing-is-caring/
https://www.museumofthehome.org.uk/explore/stories-of-home/

As we find ourselves confined to our domestic environments we explore new boundaries of shared spaces, resources and time in a speculative podcast by Space10’s. The series title ‘’Imagine’’ explores spatial scenarios relating to the scene of shared living environments.

During the collective meeting grounds session, we will co-listen to the podcast for 20 minutes before taking the time to discuss relationships and boundaries that underpin shared co-operative living dynamics, and effects of the lockdown on such scenarios. 

In relation to the current pandemic the ideology of living amongst a fixed community could satisfy our desire for more physical interactions. To question this, we will define the rules that support the foundation to positive co-inhabitant living, and what happens if these boundaries become crossed and blurred.

In response to this speculative re-imagining of co-living spaces we explore the ‘Stories of Home’ collected via the “Museum of the Home”. The personal accounts address lockdown effects, including belonging within a home environment, the feeling of space within multifunctioning rooms, and examples of appreciations of the home in the current pandemic.  

We invite you to the collective space of listening to the podcast and hope to be welcomed into your experiences of home during these challenging times.

The Common Room invites you to join a group discussion focusing on the topic of REframing redundant public spaces into multifunctioning domestic extensions.

For this discussion group we will be exploring mediums of spatial interaction whilst occupying the inbetween

During this Common Room session we will position ourselves as a collective group within a selected landscape via the medium of webcamming. In doing so we aim to explore the spatial dynamics that arise as we share this common landscape. 

You will be invited to share with us your current location through the medium of Google Street View enabling us to navigate the environment as if we were physically walking along the street and explore these ideas of inside/outside public/private.

As we position ourselves in these very in-betweens spaces of public and private domains, we aim to investigate where do these boundaries lie between one another, how the gaze of others affects our sub-consciousness understanding of being watched when we only occupy our domestic homes alone (especially in this current period of mass video calls for professional, personal and social use).

As we begin to navigate where the private begins in the public, and the public in the private we aim to consider the questions of:

• When one has to spend all their social, leisure and professional working time within one arena of space, how do the pre-existing norms and values of that environment change? 
• Do our relationships of spatial attachment conform or oppose conventional norms of post-pandemic times? Can we stretch our borders of personal space to demand occupancy of multiple environments? How can we extend the borders of our domestic spaces? 
• Are we constructing a new collective domain that offers answers to this in between space?
• How can our ideas surrounding spatial attachment adapt? Does it help us to watch and observe public spaces that are beyond our reach in order to manage confinement?

The themes for Cahier 3 of our upcoming Meeting Grounds Zine Publication will be announced on Friday 29 May via Instagram Live.

The themes will be collectively decided upon as a result of our discussion group, reading group and writing workout for Cycle 3: Codes of Community, Intimacy of Care in Digital Space, part of the ongoing Meeting Grounds Online programme.

You will be given one week to produce one page in response to the themes. 

The deadline will be Friday 5 June.

All responses will be included in the online version of the zine cahier and a selection will be chosen for the physical zine. 

We are open to all forms and styles of response.

All responses must be send to amy@onomatopee.net

And for those wanting to share their work and ideas in a more communal environment. We have organised an informal Meet-Up for Friday 5 June at 18.00 at jitsi to those who want to share your responses, ideas and contributions, or others who want to explore the themes presented further.

For our third writing workout of the series we will be conducting a session looking at Visible and Invisible Community Symbols.

meet at instagram live @onomatopeenet

Our next reading group will discuss a selected chapter from Olivia Laing’s “Funny Weather” to examine the tumultuous relationship between intimacy and loneliness in the digital sphere.

Audio version

Original Essay

For full access to Funny Weather join our Online Library via the Slack group

Joining  the Meeting Grounds Slack group gives you access to a selection of titles that each work with ideas around public space in the physical and digital spheres.

Both as a form of public intervention in digital space, and as an exploration into intimacy and silence as community codes, Meeting Grounds invites you to join Club Silencio. One of the most inclusive, least demanding clubs you will find in the digital sphere.

For one hour you are invited to join us in a common, digital space where one thing and one thing only is expected of you: you must remain silent.

You are welcome to come and go as you please. You may bring along a book, complete some writing, practice meditation, or just soak up the experience of this shared moment of silence. 

The idea behind Club Silencio is to take this time to experience and consider silence in the digital public sphere. What does silence mean as a form of communication, as a community code and as a way of being individually yet collectively together for a moment of group intimacy? 

This one hour session will be audio recorded and later released on the Meeting Grounds SoundCloud as an archived field recording. We therefore ask you to keep your mics on for the duration of the session as background noise is expected and welcome. 

The chat box will be opened for the final 10 minutes of the event for an optional group discussion of the experience. 

For our next Common Room, we invite you to join an informal group discussion focusing on topics of community and social solidarity at a time when we are notably lacking in physical contact yet our digital presences have considerably increased. 

The discussion group offers an open space to share our ideas and experiences around codes of community in the digital sphere, and ways in which we conduct care and intimacy online. 

We have included suggested reading materials as a starting point, however reading is not essential for participation. 

Questions we want to raise and discuss during the session:

• What codes of community and communication do we adopt in the digital sphere?

• How do we define digital public space and digital communities?

• How do we care for and maintain digital communities and digital public spaces?

• How are our ideas of proximity, intimacy and care changing?

• How are our individual and collective online identities changing?

As part of this discussion group we also want to create a collective archive to capture this current moment and process of change. 

Please bring along one reference point, it can be a text, a website, a film, or a podcast that has made you relate to the idea of community over this isolation period.

Suggested reading:
the sound of my voice
piratecare introduction

Meeting Grounds works on a programme and publication basis.

To celebrate the influx of community spaces being created in response to current restricted social and physical measures, the Meeting Grounds Online programme wants to produce a publication that s community-led and horizontal in approach.⠀

The Meeting Grounds Goes Online publication will therefore consist of a total of four Cahiers created over a period of two months, that each respond to a different set of themes. Every three weeks we will announce the themes for each Cahier and contributors will have one week to create and send their responses to amy@onomatopee.

We are encouraging and accepting a range of responses, from all forms, styles and disciplines.

Once all four zine cahier open calls have ended we will compile all contributions and print the zine at the Onomatopee Space at the end of June. The publication will be distributed for free.

Cahier 1 Open Call Announcement: Friday 17 April 18:00 via Instagram live @onomatopeenet

Deadline: Friday 24 April

Public Space and

• The body
• The mind
• Citizenship
• Community

Cahier 2 Open Call Announcement: Friday 8 May 18:00 via Instagram live @onomatopeenet

Deadline: Friday 15 May

Themes TBC

Cahier 3 Open Call Announcement: Friday 29 May 18:00 via Instagram live @onomatopeenet

Deadline: Friday 5 June

Themes TBC

Cahier 4 Open Call Announcement: Friday 19 June 18:00 via Instagram live @onomatopeenet

Deadline: 26 June

Themes TBC

*All Netherlands time

Our second writing workout will be led by Amy Gowen and Amy Pekal and will focus on us recalling our memories of the countryside. We will be using writing prompts to reinvision and reconnect our relationship to nature.

FOLLOW us for our writing workout series that will flex your fingers and get those creative juices flowing. We will look at different forms and techniques of writing and that relate specifically to using and thinking about space and movement. Feel free to share your writing at the end of the workout via our organised and secure pad, or keep it to work on further at a later date.

Writing Workout Two: Rewriting the Rural

Wednesday 6 May 17.30-18.30 via Instagram Live @onomatopeenet

Writing Workout Three: Topic TBC

Wednesday 27 May 17.30-18.30 via Instagram Live @onomatopeenet

Writing Workout Four: Topic TBC

Wednesday 17 June 17.30-18.30 via Instagram Live @onomatopeenet

*All times are based on Netherlands time zone

In light of COVID-19, one of the emergening phenomena is the colonization of the Rural, the reclamation of public space in areas often neglected and overlooked. In an effort to escape the over-crowded urban environments of major cities, the more affluent sections of society have been retreating to their second homes, which are, more often than not, situated in rural outposts.  

The result of such retreats and, essentially, colonization, lead to increased populations in smaller areas and a higher risk of the spread of covid in the rural locations that already face limited resources and less funded healthcare facilities. Even everyday activities and places such as supermarkets have seen an influx of not-so-local shoppers, taking over their smallholdings. All to the extent that permanent residents now feel scared to leave their homes and to visit their local public spaces in fear of excessive use and overcrowdedness. 

This second cycle of the Meeting Grounds Goes Online programme will be working with artist Amy Pekal to investigate the relationship between the rural and urban in these current times - two sites that are so often spoken of in terms of binaries and dualisms. Collectively we want to examine the values we place on such spaces and of our habits of usership and care. 

Bio: Amy Pekal (b.1993) is an artist, researcher and writer currently living and working in the Netherlands.  In her practice, she examines how dominant ideologies shape our understanding of the natural world. As a visual ethnographer, investigating and constructing environments are fundamental elements to her methodology. Her practice requires long-term and durational investigation of earth cycles and the communities that work with them. Through fieldwork, she collects material and immaterial data; field sketches, conversations, and objects such as earth, stones and sounds to form textured portraits of under-visible places and the communities that commit to the care and ongoing use of these environments. She takes the objects back to the studio in an effort to preserve ongoing processes. Some of the collected matter such as earth and other elements end up in her sculptures. The amalgamation of performative acts in the process are the building blocks that is the impetus towards ecological wholeness. 

MEETING GROUNDS GOES ONLINE - Missed one of our events? Here’s where you can find them!

We have finished the first cycle of the Meeting Grounds Goes Online programme, looking into public space in our current times. Both in terms of the restrictions placed on our access to physical public spaces and the digital communities that are being created in response. 

For the Meeting Grounds Goes Online programme we have organised a series of ongoing discussion groups, reading groups, writing workshops and a podcast series.

During these events over the past two weeks we have looked at ideas of citizenship, community and the body and discussed balconies as semi-public spaces, walking as a right to citizenship, and how we can flaneur our own domestic spaces. 

If you missed any of our events and want to catch up you can find them at: https://www.onomatopee.net/exhibition/meeting-grounds-goes-online/.

Thursday 30 April, 17.30-18.30 (Netherlands time)

Held via Zoom

The Reading Room reading group will discuss a selected chapter from one of the featured titles in the Meeting Grounds online library, to look at particular issues, topics and questions regarding public space in our current times.

For this week's Reading Room we will be discussing a selected chapter from Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, focusing on the relationship between the rural and the urban. You can access and download the text via our Meeting Grounds Reading Room Slack group.

Join the Meeting Grounds Slack group to access a selection of titles that each work with ideas around public space and to download the reading for each Reading Room

All events will be recorded unless otherwise requested and for archival purposes on the Onomatopee website Meeting Grounds page.

This event is in collaboration with artist Amy Pekal.

Bio: Amy Pekal (b.1993) is an artist, researcher and writer currently living and working in the Netherlands.  In her practice, she examines how dominant ideologies shape our understanding of the natural world. As a visual ethnographer, investigating and constructing environments are fundamental elements to her methodology. Her practice requires long-term and durational investigation of earth cycles and the communities that work with them. Through fieldwork, she collects material and immaterial data; field sketches, conversations, and objects such as earth, stones and sounds to form textured portraits of under-visible places and the communities that commit to the care and ongoing use of these environments. She takes the objects back to the studio in an effort to preserve ongoing processes. Some of the collected matter such as earth and other elements end up in her sculptures. The amalgamation of performative acts in the process are the building blocks that is the impetus towards ecological wholeness.

Reading Room One: Thursday 9 April 17.30-18.30

Rebecca Solnit Wanderlust: A History of Walking looking at walking as an act of citizenship

Reading Room Two: Thursday 30 April 17.30-18.30

Olga Tokarczuk Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead looking at the relationship between the urban and the rural

Reading Room Three: Thursday 21 May 17.30-18.30

Reading and topic TBC

Reading Room Four: Thursday 11 June 17.30-18.30

Reading and topic TBC

*Netherlands time

All held via Zoom

In light of COVID-19, one of the emergening phenomena is the colonization of the Rural, the reclamation of public space in areas often neglected and overlooked. In an effort to escape the over-crowded urban environments of major cities, the more affluent sections of society have been retreating to their second homes, which are, more often than not, situated in rural outposts.  

The result of such retreats and, essentially, colonization, lead to increased populations in smaller areas and a higher risk of the spread of covid in the rural locations that already face limited resources and less funded healthcare facilities. Even everyday activities and places such as supermarkets have seen an influx of not-so-local shoppers, taking over their smallholdings. All to the extent that permanent residents now feel scared to leave their homes and to visit their local public spaces in fear of excessive use and overcrowdedness. 

This second cycle of the Meeting Grounds Goes Online programme will be working with artist Amy Pekal to investigate the relationship between the rural and urban in these current times - two sites that are so often spoken of in terms of binaries and dualisms. Collectively we want to examine the values we place on such spaces and of our habits of usership and care. 

Join us for our upcoming discussion group, reading group and writing workout dedicated to investigating this colonization of the Rural.

Bio: Amy Pekal (b.1993) is an artist, researcher and writer currently living and working in the Netherlands.  In her practice, she examines how dominant ideologies shape our understanding of the natural world. As a visual ethnographer, investigating and constructing environments are fundamental elements to her methodology. Her practice requires long-term and durational investigation of earth cycles and the communities that work with them. Through fieldwork, she collects material and immaterial data; field sketches, conversations, and objects such as earth, stones and sounds to form textured portraits of under-visible places and the communities that commit to the care and ongoing use of these environments. She takes the objects back to the studio in an effort to preserve ongoing processes. Some of the collected matter such as earth and other elements end up in her sculptures. The amalgamation of performative acts in the process are the building blocks that is the impetus towards ecological wholeness. 

MEETING GROUNDS GOES ONLINE - Missed one of our events? Here’s where you can find them!

We have finished the first cycle of the Meeting Grounds Goes Online programme, looking into public space in our current times. Both in terms of the restrictions placed on our access to physical public spaces and the digital communities that are being created in response. 

For the Meeting Grounds Goes Online programme we have organised a series of ongoing discussion groups, reading groups, writing workshops and a podcast series.

During these events over the past two weeks we have looked at ideas of citizenship, community and the body and discussed balconies as semi-public spaces, walking as a right to citizenship, and how we can flaneur our own domestic spaces. 

If you missed any of our events and want to catch up you can find them at: https://www.onomatopee.net/exhibition/meeting-grounds-goes-online/.

Discussion Group 2: Escape to the Countryside, The Colonization of the Rural

Tuesday 28 April, 17.30-18.30 (Netherlands time)

Held via Zoom

A workbook will be produced and presented during the discussion using The White Man's Dilemma in Ecofeminism by Maria Mies, Vandana Shiva as a guiding text.

No prior reading is necessary.

This event is in collaboration with artist Amy Pekal.

*Bio: Amy Pekal (b.1993) is an artist, researcher and writer currently living and working in the Netherlands.  In her practice, she examines how dominant ideologies shape our understanding of the natural world. As a visual ethnographer, investigating and constructing environments are fundamental elements to her methodology. Her practice requires long-term and durational investigation of earth cycles and the communities that work with them. Through fieldwork, she collects material and immaterial data; field sketches, conversations, and objects such as earth, stones and sounds to form textured portraits of under-visible places and the communities that commit to the care and ongoing use of these environments. She takes the objects back to the studio in an effort to preserve ongoing processes. Some of the collected matter such as earth and other elements end up in her sculptures. The amalgamation of performative acts in the process are the building blocks that is the impetus towards ecological wholeness.

Bring a beer, a glass of wine, or some fine cordial and join our zine making session where will be producing responses to different prompts on public space. All submissions will be created within this specific time frame and at the end of the session your work will collected together to be printed and made into a zine collection at Onomatopee Projects.