Renaissance builders called it pneuma — air as breath, spirit, building material. The architecture breathes around you. It expands, contracts, pulses with its own rhythm. For three decades, @cockyeek has traced a genealogy in air and fabric. It began with costumes that extended the human body into space, then kite dresses lifting people into flight. From each encounter, something passed to the next — how wind moves through fabric, how pressure finds its own distribution, what air can do under constraint. These structures become collaborators rather than sculptures, teaching the membrane how to respond to touch, how to yield to bodies, how to hold breath without breaking. The fabric seems to remember every performance, every storm. From intimate wearable cocoons to cathedral-scale pavilions, each new generation learning to negotiate different intimacies with air. The ancestors gather athttps://anarchive.fo.am/silver/inflatable_ancestors/ — step inside their lineage.A glimpse back at the ‘Dynamics of the In-Between’ course at Nida Art Colony March 18-28 2025. This course brings together BA and MA students from the Royal Academy of Arts & Royal Conservatoire The Hague (ArtScience) and Vilnius Academy of Arts (Photography, Animation, and Media Art) in an immersive learning experience on the Curonian Spit. Positioned between the Baltic Sea and the Curonian Lagoon, the location serves as a framework for working with in-betweenness through hands-on exercises, in close proximity to natural elements, and conceptual inquiry. Course participants develop site-responsive observational skills, linking physical engagement with reflective thought. The course follows a phenomenological approach, fostering direct interaction with the environment and openness to accidental discoveries. Activities include sensory exercises, fieldwork, prototyping, interaction with human and non-human inhabitants, documentation, and discussions. Tutors: Cocky Eek ( @cockyeek ), Nele Brökelmann ( @nelebrokelmann), Sophie Durand ( @sophiedurand.news), Ignas Pavliukevičius ( @ignaspavliukevicius)
The structure breathes in steady cycles — expansion, pause, release. Stepping inside, squeezing between its membranes, you emerge, disoriented, into pure white space. Whispers cross the dome, walls dissolve, your steps rippling through the structure. Rain transforms the breathing into percussion. Within its expanding chest, two hundred bodies learn to move together. For five years, this gentle giant will traverse rural France, dropping into communities, reshaping how people gather, move, and listen together. Air escapes through stitched seams, carrying conversations back into the world outside. Read more about UMAA (‘Unité Mobile d’Action Artistique’) at https://anarchive.fo.am/silver/UMAA/. Somewhere in rural France, it’s learning how your community might move.The Mobile Artistic Action Unit is the new project conceived by Olivia Grandville. Everything revolves around an inflatable structure, created by Dutch artist Cocky Eek, a kind of base camp where a multitude of experiences can be enjoyed. Under the large bubble and in its surroundings, a community with unpredictable interactions is created. Dancers and choreographers invent festive, contemplative, participatory forms. Short performances and sudden appearances in the landscape are followed by long journeys. The audience enters, leaves, returns, dances in turn, eats. Under the large bubble and around it, everything is held together by breath, which gives life to a space where new rules of the game can be invented. See for the whole program: https://plateforme10.ch/2025/05/umaa/ Come sense the mud! Join us on 27 February at Ventilator Cinema for ‘Alterlife: Sewage and Mud’ an Sonic Acts evening with presentations of work by artists Alina Schmuch, Cocky Eek, and noiserr, and learn more about what’s deeply hidden in body and soil. With the body as the central theme of this event’s programme, educator and spatial designer Cocky Eek’s contribution will guide us into the Alterlife with a nourishing somatic exercise, after which she will discuss her ongoing thoughts about fieldwork and mud-sensing. This immersive experience will allow us to connect with the earth, embrace the tactile and sensory qualities of mud, and explore its role in shaping human perception and interaction with the environment. https://sonicacts.com/agenda/alterlife-eventIn the mood for a deep dive into the world of muddy landscapes? Mud, Air, and Tidal Rhythms – Cocky Eek interviewed by Dominika Mikołajczyk is your perfect read! Cocky Eek is known for her innovative approach to somatic practices and creative pedagogy. Her latest project explores the ‘dark skies’ of the Wadden Sea, blending sky and mud in a unique exploration of nature. In this interview for Ecoes #7 magazine, Cocky shares insights into her fieldwork in the Frisian North and the Muddy Muddy Mystery Tour– an immersive experience at the 2024 Sonic Acts Biennial. Participants engaged in wadlopen (mud walking) and mud-sensing, guided by Cocky’s artistic vision and a surprising wind that swept the group off their feet. As Cocky puts it, ‘We were pushed outside of comfort or certainty… and heard tiny bubbling sounds in the mud. It was as though we were all enclosed in a giant bubble, feeling the landscape beyond sight or touch.’read the full article: https://sonicacts.com/archive/cocky-eek-mud-air-and-tidal-rhythms?mc_cid=c3b41fae77&mc_eid=66c354f0cfFIFTH BEACON OF HI-LO: CURVE TO BE REEXPERIENCED. With Baken Marrum/Vlieland: Curve, a classic among ‘walkable’ sculptures gets new life. The inflatable work ‘Curve’ by Cocky Eek in collaboration with Schweigman& is being redeployed at two locations. It is a great opportunity to experience this work! Curve is a dizzying tunnel; the visitor enters the work on foot and alone, and undergoes a journey without visual guidance. With every step, in a cadence that is reinforced by a sound composition, the outside world drifts further away. The visitor undergoes a disorienting journey in which light, material, movement, sound and architectural form merge. A total experience in a magical and alienating world. Spatial artist Cocky Eek created the spectacular installation Curve in 2015, in collaboration with Schweigman& (theatre maker Boukje Schweigman). In this summer’s installation, the work will have a new soundtrack by Machinefabriek. Presented atHetLage Noorden, Marrum and at the Into The Great Wide Open Festival 2024Newspaper publication Leeuwarder Courant, In de compleet witte tunnel wacht een bijzondere ervaring, Gitte Brugman, 3 july 2024, pg 28-29.The local newspaper, published a great comic about the Curve installation, Het Friesch Dagblad, 9 aug 2024. thank you so much Aart Cornelissen!Research presentation Fault Lines Forum 2024. During the academic year 2023-2024 I am part of KABK’s Deep Future Research Group. my research Dark Skies and the Art of Dreaming will be presented at FaultLines. This day we will share and discuss, research projects developed in the Deep Futures Research Group. The presentations centre the processes, methods, questions, and theoretical concepts that fuel the research and are therefore accessible to anyone interested in conducting research through practice. Everyone is welcome to attend all or part of the conference—students, staff, workshop instructors, coordinators, heads, tutors, friends!Book publication: Listening a Research method in Art and Design, published by KABK Lectorate Design 2024. Contribution: “A snow Walk” pg 122-123. Royal Academy of Art (KABK), The Hague, ISBN 9789072600646
Inflatable pavillion: UMAA, Unité mobile d’action artistique, , Mille Plateaux Centre Chorégraphique National de La Rochelle (FR), Cognac 2-24 April 2024Come on the Muddy Muddy Mystery Tour and join the ‘quick and dirty’ mud sensing and listening workshop hosted by artist Cocky Eek. Where & When: Sunday, 10 March 2024 at Het Lage Noorden, Marrum, Friesland. How: Apply at the link and we will organise the travel from Amsterdam and back, field trip to the saltmarshes at the Wadden Sea, workshop, mud (guides), and a special festive and experiential diner with presentations by ArtScience students. Are you an artist in the fields of sound, listening, ecology, and sensorial experiences interested in getting your hands and ears dirty? To join the workshop and listen in, to, and with the tidal landscape along the Frisian coastline, submit a small application form by 17 February 👉 Sonic Acts -Muddy Muddy Mystery TourFoAMs’ Anarchivelooks at FoAM’s multi-decade existence from different vantage points, to unearth or revisit things that can have generative potential for the here-and-now and the yet-to-come. The anarchived materials from the FoAM network complement and contrast newly commissioned pieces by FoAM’s members, collaborators and friends. You can visit FoAM’s five thematic journeys here, my blogpost 1000-portals and Walk withme are small parts of the whole. post 6 June 2023.Book publication: AField Guide to Machine Wilderness: a book by Theun Karelse and Alice Smits. The FGMW was Launced at 22th September 2023, Zone2Source, Amsterdam. 11 students of the ArtScience Interfacultyparticipated in Why Look at Animals? led by Cocky Eek, part of the Machine Wilderness program at ARTIS Royal Zoo in Amsterdam. Where we e explored if we can rediscover animals as highly esteemed informants and guides. The findings are published n pg 131-151. The PDF can be founde here: Fieldguide to Machine Wilderness. post 23 September 2023.The two-days workshop-program Field Academy:Amstelpark as Sensorial Heritage: is given by a myriad of wonderful workshop leaders, all delving into the discreet and intangible legacy of the Amstelpark which allowed the participants to anchor in the worldly in a total new way. Program see: Zone2Source, Amstelpark, Amsterdam. Read the fieldreport by Anne-Florence Neveu. 24-25 September 2022.The installation Void is presented at the Conflux Festival 2022 is an installation where one could insert its head into a pitch black sphere in which kinetic sound became the major actor in an experience of amaurosis. Besides all the conceptual metaphors this act embodies, the work gives the audience a sensorial experience, reminding us of our direct relation to the world through our senses. What happens if you take them away, or enhance others by creating a hyper focus on sound? Void: a collaboration with Joris Strijbos. Conflux Festival, 2-5 June 2022, V2-Roterdam, NL.The Installation Spectrum makes color tactile and tangible. How intensely can you experience color? Color as a phenomenon which you don’t just see, but which totally absorbs…Escape the mundane. Fall backwards into a black hole and reawaken in an infinite spectrum. An immersive experience which will give you a whole new perspective on the everyday life. ‘Following Blaas and Curve, Spectrum completes a triptych centered on white space, each piece created with spatial designer Cocky Eek. In Blaas you crawl through an inflatable balloon; in Curve you enter an endlessly spiraling tunnel. Spectrum starts by asking: how can we make the color physically tangible?’ A joint project involving Matthijs Munnik, a light artist with an extraordinary sense of color, and composer Yannis Kyriakides, who turns the sound composition into a spatial experience. produced by Schweigman&. Presented 9 feb t/m 16 feb 2022, Le Lieu Unique, Nantes, FR.cancelled due to Covid.23rd Biennale of Sydney. For the Space In Between program Carolyn Strauss Slow Research Lab was joined by spatial designer Cocky Eek and landscape architect Anna Fink to create a site-specific intervention called Resonant Bodies_Tank Stream. The audio-based exercise invites Biennale visitors to gently tune their awareness to diverse scales and substance of the local urban landscape—situating their bodies within it while encouraging them to stretch their perception to more-than-human spaces and temporalities. 2 march-13 juni 2022.Published interview with Olivia Grandville, artistic director of Mille Plateaux Centre Chorégraphique National de La Rochelle (FR) and Cocky Eek by Gilles Amalvi. Newsletter sept/dec 2022.Book publication: For the absolutely wonderful Slow Spatial Reader: Chronicles of Radical Affection, edited by Carolyn F. Strauss, I contributed the essay Standing with Two Feet in Complex Matter, Amsterdam: Valiz, 2021, Published under the Creative Commons. Slow Spatial Readeroffers a collection of essays about ‘Slow’ approaches to spatial practice and pedagogy from around the world. The book’s contributors are from twenty-four countries on five continents. Each one brings distinct philosophical and disciplinary approaches—from ‘spatial’ fields like architecture, sculpture, and installation, but also performative, somatic and/or dramaturgical practices—, exploring how we think about and engage with space at a range of scales, tempos, and durations.Book publication: Landscape of Car – a handbook for urban design engagement: essay contribution. This publication offers a window into a cross-cultural project of urban design engagement in the city of Tiznit, Morocco. Led by the Netherlands-based platform Slow Research Lab, the bureau of architect Salima Naji, and Naji’s nonprofit association Gardiens de la Mémoire, the project involved creative practitioners from fields including architecture, design, landscape, urbanism, and artistic research. Published on Dec 6 – 2020
