Nadine Gouders
Nadine Gouders is an ideals-led cultural worker supporting artists, designers and cultural institutions in the realization of projects. She’s worked for several Dutch museums as a curator, project manager and registrar, shaping her as a researcher and ally in the production of artistic work and exhibitions. Her practice is connected by projects with a sensibility for social-political developments and impacts felt by the humans and non-humans she works and co-exists with.
How do we counter rising fascism? We organize!
In their first artistic collaboration, artists Jeanne van Heeswijk and Jonas Staal gather more than forty art-activists, musicians, political organizations and social movements to collectively perform a 12-hour anti-fascist musical sermon.
Together, they transform the Paradijskerk in Rotterdam into an anti-fascist church: a space where the broadest coalition possible assembles in common opposition to rising authoritarianism, genocide, misogyny, systemic racism and the dismantling of critical democratic institutions.
At engage, we’re committed to making our programmes accessible to everyone.
For the entry and stage of the church, Van Heeswijk and Staal have developed an immersive installation honouring anti-fascist symbols of the past and proposing new ones for common resistance against (neo)fascism. Here, for twelve hours, organizations from across the political spectrum will collectively contribute to the musical sermon, celebrating and strengthening the links between communal, embodied and spiritual practices of liberation, across social, feminist, LGBTQI+, Black and ecological struggles. An improvisational chorus responds to parts of the sermon in between speeches, turning the twelve hours into a collective political and musical event. The Anti-Fascist Church is open to anyone who stands in opposition to fascism. Together, we’ll celebrate anti-fascist unity across difference.
11.10.2025
engage at Paraijdskerk, Rotterdam
24 media artworks on demonstrations and political actions in public space offer a multifaceted view of how video and media artists work with the imagery, structures, symbolism and impact of various forms of protest and political activism within the public domain.
PROTEST tells powerful and relevant stories, addressing racial and gender equality, war, freedom, human rights, democracy, capitalism, corruption and climate emergency. The participating artists initiate, stage, document, analyse and reimagine protests – and their imagery – into thought-provoking video installations and short documentaries that cut through protest’s portrayal in the news.
Curator: Bart van den Boom
13.09.2025 - 16.11.2025
Viewmaster Projects, Maastricht
The Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes (CICC) is a project by Radha D’Souza and Jonas Staal that stages public hearings in immersive installations functioning as a court, to prosecute intergenerational climate crimes committed by states and corporations acting together. These hearings address crimes of the past, present and future, reflecting the intergenerational impacts of climate crimes on ecologies and communities.
This newly commissioned chapter of the CICC consists of a specially appointed court constructed within the former concrete hall of Ambika P3 in London. It was in London that the East India Company was founded in 1600, and where the corporate entity would subsequently shape the city in its own interests and image. The court will interrogate witnesses regarding the crimes committed by the British East India Company, highlighting the interconnectedness of colonial and climate crimes that continue to shape our devastating present and future.
Non-human agents will act as evidence and witnesses in the court, in this case in the form of plants that played a pivotal role in the colonial and industrial projects of the British Crown and the East India Company. The audience present will have the task to act as public jury members.
05.04.2025 - 24.05.2025
Serpentine at Ambika P3, London
Climate Propagandas Congregation, convened by Jonas Staal, is a two-day gathering with cultural workers, theorists, activists, and organizers to collectively imagine and propagate forms of meaningful collective survival in—and in spite of—the present extinction wars.
Climate Propagandas Congregation takes place in a large-scale installation, best described as an “immersive diorama.” The diorama depicts biota of the geological era known as the Ediacaran (635 million years to 541 million years ago), which was a unique non-predatory cooperative ecology consisting of beings that were neither plants nor animals. This “pre-socialist socialist ecology” teaches that complex life on earth propagates from a history of fundamental collectivity, not Darwinist competition.
In the installation, Ediacaran biota are combined with the faces of historical revolutionaries: the ancestors from whom contemporary radical egalitarian imaginaries have been inherited.
14.12.2024 - 15.12.2024
BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht
Humans are not the only workers: non-human animals, plants, fungi, and bacteria have collectively made our planet liveable. We are all Earth Workers, in the words of writer, lawyer and activist Radha D’Souza.
Earth Workers Requiem/Jubilate is a spatial and musical installation by composer Micha Hamel and visual artist Jonas Staal. For the project, Hamel composed six hours of electronic music inspired by geological epochs, combined with live instrumental and vocal performances. Staal created a fossil landscape filled with pyramids of petroleum and ammonites, resulting from the labor of past life forms. Woven banners depict the rare species that thrive in the climate crisis: they form the fossil archive of the future.
Earth Workers Requiem/Jubilate creates space for mourning the destruction inflicted on our planet by fossil-fuel industry elites. As an expansion of the final line of the Communist Manifesto, the piece calls for unity not only among workers of all lands but also of workers across all times.
09.11.2024 - 09.03.2025
Noordbrabants Museum, Den Bosch
In the Collaborations for Future program, a laboratory for unexpected climate collaborations, designers spent time with a climate scientist. Not only did they have access to the scientist’s work, they could also ask questions and get to know the scientist on a personal level. This is quite unique, because normally we do not have easy access to scientific knowledge, let alone the possibility to interact with scientists in an environment where they can go beyond their role as scientists: to philosophize, explore and create together.
In Open Climate Call, developed by Myrthe Krepel, visitors were given a simple task: to have a phone conversation with a climate scientist. Before the phone starts ringing, participants hear a short introduction that invites them to reflect on the ‘art of conversation’. For both the person calling and the climate scientist the phone line is a space of exploration and play. How do we talk about climate change? How do we talk about difficult things in our society? What is a good conversation? The public debate often follows a monological structure, in which we use language to clarify and safeguard predetermined interests to others. Talking with people who have different views is often not easy. However, individuals with different perspectives that come together can create something new together.
19.10.2023 - 27.10.2024
Foundation We Are, Dutch Design Week, Eindhoven
How is power distributed and exercised in the European Union? Can individuals influence that power? And if so, how? With the unique artistic research project "Soft Power," we invited residents of Brabant to explore the inner workings of the European Union.
Participants in Soft Power took on the role of Brabant lobbyists, who, for a common goal, need forms of "soft power" to gain EU officials' support.
For an hour, they delved into the world of the EU in the Pop-up Parliament, and were given the tools to learn how the EU actually works. There, they discovered the roles needed to make a lobbying plan successful at the European level.
Soft Power was developed by Myrthe Krepel, concept development and design in collaboration with Pauline Wiersema.
01.06.2024 - 28.06.2024
BrabantKennis, Ruchpen, Eindhoven and Veghel
The exhibition ‘Onder de wol’ invited visitors to discover the stories behind wool, the Dutch wool surplus and new uses for the material. Christien Meindertsma’s research on and experimentation with wool has led to the invention of the FLOCKS Wobot. The Wobot is a new and independently developed cobot, especially made for working with local European wools that would be otherwise disposed of. It is a collaborative robot that makes it possible to build three-dimensional structures with wool industrially for the first time, without adding any material or using water in the felting process. The three-dimensional wool structures that it creates are strong and soft at the same time. In the exhition, visitors could see a history of Meindertsma’s projects involving wool, leading up to the engineering of the Wobot and the first structures that it built. One of the first two Wobots was on display, along with a newly developed film by Roel van Tour.
This project was initiated by guest curator Noëlle Kemmerling and developed together with Christien Meindertsma and Cuypershuis curator Nadine Gouders.
19.10.2023 - 12.05.2024
Cuypershuis, Roermond
Comrades Against Extinction is an installation and musical procession develop by lawyer, academic, writer and activist Radha D’Souza and artist Jonas Staal, in collaboration with musicians Ánnámáret, Anni Elif, Ali Saad, and the Philomela Choir. The work consists of a large tower covered with paintings of animals that have been made extinct from the colonial period to the present, which was erected on the main Kansalaistori square in Helsinki, facing the national parliament.
During the inauguration of the tower, Ánnámáret, Elif, Saad and the Philomela Choir led a musical procession from the parliament to the square, carrying the images of the extinct, each termed “comrade” in a different – sometimes extinct – language. The score, based on a script written by D’Souza and Staal, contains the names of the extinct, as well as slogans that declare intergenerationality, interdependency and regeneration as the pillars of our shared human and non-human struggle against extinction.
18.08.2022
Helsinki Festival, Helsinki