Artist Spotlight Walk with Femke Herregraven

The effects of abstract value systems on landscapes, ecosystems, language, historiography, and daily life form the core of Femke Herregraven’s research into the interaction between financial markets, geological forces, and the physical world. The artist examines self-organizing systems, particularly the financialization of the future as catastrophe, through sculptures, drawings, films, and speculative fiction. 

Her newly commissioned installation The Evacuated (Memory Machines of Sonsbeek) at Sonsbeek 2026 is modeled as a forest driven by instability, and inspired by a Dutch gene bank forest. A real-time simulation of a forest ecosystem mutates continuously, fed by three sensing sculptures across the park. The spatial installation shows how the park’s historical structures can become proto-memory machines within an existing ecology of latency and change. It presents a system which does not keep, but continuously generates memories.

On Saturday 29 August Femke Herregraven will dive deeper into the system and the elements of her work. She will take you on a walk past her sculptures at the waterfall, the Spicarium and the ice cellar, and the real time simulation in the Grote Vijver. At each location she will both elaborate on the workings of her site-responsive installation, as well as on the rich history of Park Sonsbeek as Arnhem’s first industrial site.

Attendance is free, please register beforehand.
Start of walk: Molenplaats Sonsbeek