Do cartographers still know the extent to which the Arctic can be represented on a world globe, with polar ice caps increasingly melting? Does your sex life change alongside global warming and coinciding temperature rise, as is the case with sea animals? What pictograms should you developed to prevent future inhabitants of the Earth from opening an underground closed storage of nuclear waste? Losing land to sea, losing ice to the sun, losing animals to history: how do we deal with this new notion of ecological grief?*

RADIUS is a center for contemporary art and ecology.

We are located in the city of Delft and stationed in the pump house and water basin belonging to the Delft water tower, a historical monument and architectural landmark.

With five hundred square meters of subterranean exhibition space, our program is dedicated to the intersection of art, science and ecology.

The name RADIUS is based on the circular geometry of our exhibition space. In a more poetic sense, the radius of each circle in our program serves to jointly develop a more grounded understanding of our shared living environment.

The compounded crisis of capitalism, sociopolitical unrest, environmental catastrophe and technological transformation is becoming increasingly pressing and tangible, simultaneously on a local level and on a planetary scale. In addition, the struggle for social emancipation—and the process of awareness-raising surrounding the oppression of certain social groups—is inextricably linked to the current ecological depression, re-drawing attention to the fragility of Earth and life itself. In our view, issues of decolonization and feminism cannot be separated from their interfaces with ecology. Within our program we approach this scheme by means of intersectional ecological thinking: a form of thinking through crossroads in which interests are directly related to each other.

We believe that artists have an essential role in identifying, critiquing and shaping the narrative around the climate and ecological degradation, not necessarily in aiding science with visible solutions but to pose moral and ethical questions around what it means to be alive today.

In our program we thus welcome artists and other practitioners that rigorously approach urgent ecological challenges, including climate breakdown, pollution, biodiversity loss, environmental and social justice.

The art center’s location in Delft, with proximity to some of the world’s leading scientific institutions, provides an opportunity for us to focus on collaborations between disciplines.

In addition to a continuous and accessible exhibition program, we offer an educational public program of lectures, performances, screenings, workshops and seminars, for a more specialized audience as well as for primary, secondary and higher education pupils and students.

*Paraphrased from the text Retreat coinciding with the research project by Xandra van der Eijk.

Support RADIUS

RADIUS is an art center in the making. We started taking the first steps in realizing the art center in November 2020. Where the first half of 2021 was mainly focused on writing the upcoming annual program, forming a base team and creating visibility, the second half of 2021 will be largely dedicated to generating financial resources.

RADIUS is the first Dutch art institution with an ongoing program focussed on climate, nature and ecology. We currently find ourselves in a promising, adventurous but equally vulnerable and precarious position. We have a space that we can permanently program, an unprecedented time investment by those involved from the very beginning, and ambitious plans. The missing part is a solid financial foundation to lead the renovation and realize the program. This year the pump house and our future underground exhibition spaces will be renovated but this will not be possible without your support! We want to join forces to ensure that we can ground an art center that seems more important than ever, especially in these uncertain times.

The crowdfunding campaign on Voordekunst has succeeded! Thank you for your contributions. Continue to support us by making a donation:

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