With BEYOND POLITICAL LIMITS, the 2025 RADIUS year-programme focuses on developing new language templates informed by the convergence of art and science. Through a programme revolving around observation, fieldwork, reflection and imagination, RADIUS aims to offer a counterpoint to the language of status-quo politics, currently failing to create a shared desire to collectively confront and mitigate climate change and reverse ecological breakdown, biodiversity loss and the rapid depletion of life forms. BEYOND POLITICAL LIMITS delves further into the political representation and advocacy of the more-than-human, and the ongoing need for collective political resistance within a highly polarised political climate. By means of four exhibitions, a public and educational programme, we aim to present the work of artists and other stakeholders to imagine the ways by which humans and non-humans alike can emancipate and organise themselves politically, moving towards a multispecies political ecology.

We hope to meet you at RADIUS in 2025 during the BEYOND POLITICAL LIMITS year-programme!

AT RADIUS IN 2025

⌀ A PARLIAMENT OF OWLS
A CONSORTIUM OF CRABS
A CULTURE OF BACTERIA
A LABOR OF MOLES
A BUSINESS OF FERRETS
A SIEGE OF HERONS
A CONSPIRACY OF LEMURS
A WISDOM OF WOMBATS
A PANDEMONIUM OF PARROTS
⌀ SEA VOICES IN THE CORAL CABINET
8 MARCH — 18 MAY 2025

The 2025 year-programme starts in spring with the group exhibition A PARLIAMENT OF OWLS (...). This multispecies group exhibition argues that it is time for a new kind of political balance of power, beyond exclusively human-centered political representation. This in the interest of a polyphonous and multispecies politics that oversteps conventional human-animal relations. Drawing on the work of a diverse group of artists and civic organisations, the exhibition investigates the possibilities of supporting a propositional, affirmative and action-oriented politics with a broadened bandwidth towards a multispecies political ecology. This exhibition thus places the living at the centre of the collective field of attention, that while we, as humans, in our cultural self-image do not see ourselves as living beings and thus put ourselves outside of the equation. What tactics do we need for—as philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers calls it—to form an ‘ecology of practices’, in which multi-sensory embodied knowledge and care becomes part of our relationship to the multifarious and multispecies living environment again? Towards a parliament, a union and a resistance movement for the more-than-human!

Simultaneously, RADIUS will host the educational programme SEA VOICES IN THE CORAL CABINET (from the Dutch ‘ZEESTEMMEN IN HET KORAALKABINET’). This programme is specifically aimed at students from Delft primary schools, and is realised in cooperation with DOK. In SEA VOICES IN THE CORAL CABINET, students will explore and discuss topics such as global warming and pollution of the sea and the impact this has on sea life. During the workshop, the concept of rights of nature is playfully introduced to students. What wishes would sea beings have in times of unprecedented climate change? In collaboration with artist Wieneke Bremer, students will design a communal textile coral reef, inspired by ecosystems in which cooperation is key. The students will experiment with several textile crafts, such as crochet and felting, to create marine animal habitats. The educational programme concludes with a public event where the coral reef will be presented to the Delft community.

⌀ WE ARE ALL HOLOBIONTS!
⌀ ALMA HEIKKILÄ: INDIVIDUALITY, IDENTITY, AND RELATED METAPHYSICAL IDEAS 
31 MAY — 24 AUGUST 2025

The summer season commences with the group exhibition WE ARE ALL HOLOBIONTS! Coined in 1991 by American microbiologist Lynn Margulis (1938-2011), the term holobiont refers to a host body—think of a coral reef, the human intestines or lichens—and its associated communities of microorganisms. A host body and its microbiota thus form a holobiont: an overarching composite life form constituted by different species that together form an ecological unit, therein demonstrating the importance of symbiosis for our and the planet’s health. In a similar fashion, the exhibition WE ARE ALL HOLOBIONTS! forms a multilayered assemblage that challenges current mechanisms of domination, competition, hierarchies, power structures and categorisation, in favour of ‘new’ ways of thinking and being in the world, in which reciprocity, interdependence, symbiosis and mutualism form the basis.

Simultaneously we present a solo exhibition by Alma Heikkilä, who lives and works in Helsinki. Alma Heikkilä’s works are often attempts to represent things that cannot be experienced by the human body and its senses. These include microbial life forms too small to be consciously encountered in everyday life; forest ecosystems where important processes occur underground and within plants; and many large-scale phenomena that occur at speeds and dimensions beyond our comprehension. She is a founding member of Mustarinda, a multidisciplinary collective based in the ancient forests of Northern Finland that organises residencies at the intersection of art and ecology. For her solo exhibition at RADIUS, Heikkilä will present new work that explores the entanglement of the human body with the environment. The emphasis will be of humans and the often unnoticed importance of microbial life forms that make human life possible ––think, for example, of bacteria in the intestinal flora, or phytoplankton in the production of oxygen. Mixing ideas around philosophy of biology, biological individuality, metaphysics, and personal identity, the works in the exhibition confuse and challenge the understanding in both the oneness and sameness of who we are.

⌀ WERKER COLLECTIVE
6 SEPTEMBER — 23 NOVEMBER 2025

In the autumn, RADIUS is delighted to present a solo exhibition by WERKER COLLECTIVE. Since 2009, WERKER COLLECTIVE has been working at the intersection of labour, ecofeminism and LGBTQ+ movements. For their solo exhibition at RADIUS, WERKER will present a project that expands on their interest in queer reproduction as the intergenerational transmission of knowledge and (counter)cultures through gatherings, celebrations, art, literature, music and printed matter. Using different materialities and set-ups, WERKER will activate their ever-expanding archive to interweave questions of political representation, oppression, and solidarity, whilst simultaneously putting into question the violent and alienating systems of categorisations among species, the reproductive definition of sexuality, and the political stratification of the body. During this period, the exhibition will host collaborations with artists, activists, and collectives for performances, workshops, reading sessions and other types of activities, as all of which lie at the core of WERKER’s mission of threading intersectional and transnational network of workers. 

⌀ CAN THE MONSTER SPEAK?
6 DECEMBER 2025 — 22 FEBRUARY 2026

During the winter season, RADIUS presents the group exhibition CAN THE MONSTER SPEAK? Inspired by writer and philosopher Paul B. Preciado’s speech at the academy of psychoanalysts of Paris, this exhibition will inquire into the historical construction of the queer body as monstrous vis-à-vis the construction of the normative, heterosexual body under modern political, economic, and sexual regimes. Further borrowing from Preciado's latest philosophical work, the exhibition will explore dysphoric politics as a queer horizon of liberation and connect it with the counter-discourse of the monster—and its relation with modernity's discourse on the more-than-human—as a queer emancipatory figure of speech. 

BEYOND POLITICAL LIMITS YEAR-PROGRAMME

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Alongside the overarching title BEYOND POLITICAL LIMITS, the 2025 year-programme at RADIUS focuses on developing new language templates informed by the convergence of art and science. Through a program revolving around observation, fieldwork, reflection and imagination, RADIUS aims to offer a counterpoint to the language of status-quo politics, currently failing to create a shared desire to collectively confront and mitigate climate change.

Whether we are talking about the nitrogen crisis, the protection of the Wadden Sea against oil drilling, floods in Limburg, or earthquakes in Groningen, the political reality seems extremely malleable while the boundaries of our ecosystems are fixed. Against this capricious background, RADIUS presents BEYOND POLITICAL LIMITS, a year-programme on the political representation and advocacy of the more-than-human, and the ongoing need for collective political resistance within a highly polarised political climate. By means of four exhibitions and a public and educational programme, we aim to present the work of visual artists to imagine the ways by which humans and non-humans alike can emancipate and organise themselves politically beyond the current political status quo. Within this programme, we thus focus on restoring relations between humans and non-humans, zoom in on the emancipation and representation of multispecies worlds and the fundamental notion of interdependence on a microbiological level on the one hand (exhibition chapters I and II). In the second half of the year, on the other hand, we focus on a further reconstruction of social groups that have traditionally been ignored, marginalised and dispossessed through binary and dualistic thinking in politics and science (exhibition chapters III and IV). How can we (re)introduce new voices into the political arena, so that the climate, non-human life forms, oppressed and marginalised groups are granted a voice and can be heard?

Building on this, RADIUS intends to become a space and platform that promotes and supports resistance to current political and socio-economic hegemony, moving towards a multispecies political ecology. In other words, we want to generate space for challenging dominant values, ideas and existing power relations. In our view, this hegemony is overly focused on the, for both humans and the living environment, exhausting effects of neoliberalism, advanced capitalism, as well as the polarising effects of far-right politics and consequent populist thought patterns. With the 2025 year-programme, we aim to formulate a counterpoint that instead promotes affect, solidarity, reciprocity and interdependence in the interest of systemic change and countering anthropogenic (man-made) climate change. Here, we see an important role for art, which provides the key element for action and agency through imagination. Or as French philosopher and activist Michel Foucault noted, “Where there is power, there is resistance.”

* The year-programme BEYOND POLITICAL LIMITS is developed as a continuation and extension of the 2024 year-programme THE LIMITS TO GROWTH, which explored the increasing imbalance between economy and ecology.