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Door: 20:00h CET
Start: 23:00h CET
Entrance: 0/3/5/7/10 euro (pay wat you can)
Location: Varia (Gouwstraat 3, Rotterdam)
How do city rats, Japanese knotweed and aquatic animals relate to board games, shadow theater, and deep space? The Multispecies Festival returns to find the answer to this question by showcasing new collaborations and connections between different species in the field of performance. This year, the programme spans two months, with activities in both June and July. We have invited a multitude of artists that explore new ways of engaging with the living world around us, be it through field recording, instrument building, puppetry or other kinds of performance. You are invited to join us in this endeavour. We hope to see you soon!
Di Fang presents Descent Protocol, a guided performance that draws from the artist’s scuba diving practices, underwater field recordings, and oceanic research to explore forms of listening beneath the surface. Through collective breathing exercises, spoken navigation, and submerged sonic environments, participants are guided through an imagined descent into underwater caves, extraction zones, and shifting marine infrastructures. Borrowing from the relational logic of diving — where survival depends on heightened sensory awareness and mutual trust — the performance approaches the ocean not as landscape, but as a medium of pressure, dependency, and entangled ecological systems. The work combines voice, hydrophone recordings, ambient sound, and performative instruction to create a shared sensory environment between human and more-than-human worlds.
Joke Caimo (they/them/she/her) is an artist exploring how collective energy, intimacy, and physiological rhythms can become forms of communication. Their work creates situations in which people influence one another through breath, pleasure, voice, enthusiasm, and other subtle signals — often amplified by cyborg tools and participatory instruments. Caimo develops hybrid devices such as the Human Organ Instrument (HOI), which translates breath into organ tones and turns groups of participants into a breathing ensemble. They are co-initiator of Samenschool, an artist-run community center and print studio dedicated to collective imagination, experimental learning, and new ways of being together.
Lisa Zakharova and Pau Jordà invite you to a performance of light and shadow. A musical puppet and shadow performance! Japanese knotweed, an invasive plant species, is the main character and the main musical instrument. What is an invasive species? How can we collaborate with our ecologies? How to dance with the weeds and grasses?
Pau Jordà (he/they) is a Valencian multi-instrumentalist, improviser and instrument maker, with a background in jazz saxophone. Lisa Zakharova (she/her) is a visual artist painter and storytelle based in Rotterdam. She investigates the intersections between folklore and ecologies, her works described as fairytale eco punk.
https://lisazakharova.art/
https://www.instagram.com/pau__puc/
This event is made possible with the kind support of Popunie Rotterdam, Fonds Podiumkunsten, Gemeente Rotterdam, Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industrie and Buitenplaats Brienenoord.