Amsterdam Artis Zoo Winter School January 2018
Nick Shepherd and Christian Ernsten were joined by dance animateur Nicola Visser in leading the first winter school of the Master of Museology degree at the Reinwardt Academy. The winter school took place in collaboration with Artis Amsterdam Royal Zoo. Artis was one of the earliest museums of Amsterdam. In the past, it also held about 12,000 objects from Africa, Oceania, and Asia. Currently, it consists of a designed park, a collection of living animals, plants, and trees, a “dead” natural history collection (stuffed animals, geology, shells, skeletons), collections of art, history, and ethnography, and 28 national monuments. The issue at stake during the winter school concerned the idea of a zoo in the Anthropocene. How do we understand zoos in general, and Artis Zoo in particular, in an epoch in which human impact on the earth and its eco-systems is the main force to be reckoned with? How do zoos respond to the challenges of biodiversity and climate change? What should a zoo of and for the Anthropocene look like? Students worked through the ideas at the heart of the “zoo walk” via embodied research methods, as a way of imagining the zoo’s alternative futures in the Anthropocene.
This insert is based on work done by students in the Master of Museology program at the Reinwardt Academy at the Amsterdam University of the Arts.
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