Reinier Hoon has been selected for the MERIAN PhD candidature
Co-supervised by Christian Ernsten and Darian Meacham from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Maastricht University, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart (Tamarind Rosetti and Stephen Wright) and plant breeder Andrea Ghedina, Hoon brings forth OLERACEA, a research project that approaches agricultural practice as a site of cultural practice and academic inquiry.
Taking the specie Brassica Oleracea (cabbage in all its forms) as a focal point, the project examines cultivation, selection and generation as cultural and creative gestures. OLERACEA questions the generative capacity of highly professional and capital intensive breeding projects by sidelining it with a participatory, creative and open-ended methodology.
Rooted at Hoeve Kesselt (Riemst), the project embraces open-ended, experimental breeding processes. By combining artistic research with ecological plant breeding, OLERACEA seeks to expand both the genetic diversity of cabbages and the cultural ways in which they are valued, imagined, and understood.
Ultimately, the research asks how plant breeding might function as a form of artistic and relational practice, and how such an approach can contribute to more sustainable, diverse, and culturally rich agricultural futures and expand eco-ststemic visions of human and other-than-human culinary and artistic agency and autonomy.
Reinier Hoon
Reinier Hoon is a grower, researcher and plant breeder working at the intersection of agriculture, ecology and philosophy. He holds an MA in Political Philosophy from Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, which informs his engagement with questions of responsibility, care and value within contemporary food systems.
His practice is rooted in organic vegetable farming, where he explores biodiversity, taste, seed sovereignty and regenerative land use through hands-on cultivation as well as critical inquiry. A central concern in his work is the ongoing loss of (genetic) diversity in agriculture and its implications for ecological resilience, cultural depth and nutritional agency.
Co-supervised by Christian Ernsten and Darian Meacham from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Maastricht University, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart (Tamarind Rosetti and Stephen Wright) and plant breeder Andrea Ghedina, Hoon brings forth OLERACEA, a research project that approaches agricultural practice as a site of cultural practice and academic inquiry.
Taking the specie Brassica Oleracea (cabbage in all its forms) as a focal point, the project examines cultivation, selection and generation as cultural and creative gestures. OLERACEA questions the generative capacity of highly professional and capital intensive breeding projects by sidelining it with a participatory, creative and open-ended methodology.
Rooted at Hoeve Kesselt (Riemst), the project embraces open-ended, experimental breeding processes. By combining artistic research with ecological plant breeding, OLERACEA seeks to expand both the genetic diversity of cabbages and the cultural ways in which they are valued, imagined, and understood.
Ultimately, the research asks how plant breeding might function as a form of artistic and relational practice, and how such an approach can contribute to more sustainable, diverse, and culturally rich agricultural futures and expand eco-ststemic visions of human and other-than-human culinary and artistic agency and autonomy.
Reinier Hoon
Reinier Hoon is a grower, researcher and plant breeder working at the intersection of agriculture, ecology and philosophy. He holds an MA in Political Philosophy from Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, which informs his engagement with questions of responsibility, care and value within contemporary food systems.
His practice is rooted in organic vegetable farming, where he explores biodiversity, taste, seed sovereignty and regenerative land use through hands-on cultivation as well as critical inquiry. A central concern in his work is the ongoing loss of (genetic) diversity in agriculture and its implications for ecological resilience, cultural depth and nutritional agency.
MERIAN
The Maastricht Experimental Research in and through the Arts Network (MERIAN) named after the early modern artist-scientist Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717), MERIAN is the partnership for artistic research and artistic research-based learning and education in Maastricht. It brings together Zuyd University of Applied Sciences, Maastricht University, and the Jan van Eyck Academie (JvE). MERIAN invites established artists and academics to engage in collaborative research in between making and thinking. By developing new norms and forms of embodied knowledge and by advocating for new and creative methods of doing research and teaching, MERIAN redefines the relationships between existing cultural and academic institutions and addresses pressing societal concerns relevant to the Meuse-Rhine Euregion.