The ecological system

During this evening, poet/composer Rozalie Hirs and writer/artist Miek Zwamborn unite topics that keep recurring in their poetry, music and visual work. Allow yourself to be carried away during this dialogue to lyrical, playful language experiments and odes to birds, butterflies, shrublands, quaking bogs, pools and sea plants and marvel with these two impressionists at the interplay between organisms and communities of life, which they adventurously study and translate into different media.

We will see visual work by Miek Zwamborn and listen to music by Rozalie Hirs, alongside nature shots made in different landscapes. Also screened, is the short animation film a throwaway coincidence that determined everything (2004), which Paul Leyton made based on ‘o little thistle’ (from: ecologica, 2023) by Rozalie Hirs.

The evening will end with a round-table discussion with Zwamborn and Hirs, led by Anneke Brassinga.

About the guest speakers

In the creative work of Rozalie Hirs (Gouda, 7 April 1965), a love of language, music, science and technology runs like a thread. The adventure of listening, reading and imagination is central. Within poetry, Hirs develops a fluid style, playing with sound in different layers of meaning and reading possibilities. The reader can choose from these again and again, shaping their own reading experience to a large extent. Her poetry appears in the form of poetry collections, published by Querido|Singel publishers, and digital poetry, interactive poems created in collaboration with visual artists and graphic designers.

Miek Zwamborn is a writer, translator, and visual artist. Landscape and history play an important role in her work. On the basis of observations, historical material and scientific reports, she researches her own encounters and existing stories to link these fragments through different media. Since 2017, she has been mapping the south-west coastline of the Scottish island of Mull, where she set up the collective study site KNOCKvologan. She published the novels Oploper (2000), Falling Wood (2004) and the poetry collection Het krieken van sepia (2008). In 2013, her third novel The Thumb’s Leap was published, in 2017 the essayistic nature book Wieren and in 2023 the collection Onderling by publisher Van Oorschot.