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The Volkstuin index

Cultivates lithopunctures

2026
Volkstuinvereniging Tuinderslust, Rotterdam Noord, NL
Research residency

Funder: Amarte Fonds development grant
Host: Nature of Rotterdam
Expert: Esther Hoogendijk, artist
Links → Amarte Fonds → Nature of Rotterdam → Esther Hoogendijk

The Volkstuin Index begins with a question carried over from Civic Anchors, the practice's Prix de Rome inquiry: can a material hold the soul of a site - carry, in stone, clay, and root, an image of its many facets? Here the question narrows to one place and turns practical. How does this ground tell itself?

The Volkstuinvereniging Tuinderslust, in Rotterdam-Noord, is a modest patchwork of plots, sheds, and bell-hung gates. The ground beneath drops through a whole history: a worked crust of wood chips and brick, a clay seal turning from ochre to grey, and under it the peat of a drowned alder-willow carr - the garden resting some 2.5 metres below sea level, on land that sank in place rather than washing away. The Index reads it as a single continuum, layered at once by geology, by the seasons, and by the gardeners, none on the same clock, none ever finished.

A garden across disciplines

Reading a ground this layered takes more than one discipline. The residency crosses landscape architecture, soil science, botany, and ethnography - the multidisciplinary method the Amarte development grant sets out to support - each a different way into the same garden. Its clock is set by the people who hold it: Maarten and Monic have tended one plot for fifty-five years, and their sense of it - "the garden is never over" - runs through everything the Index records.

It begins with the community's marks: the portals, bells, and salvaged thresholds each gardener sets at the edge of a plot - an index of how a shared ground is claimed and tended, one gate at a time.

Foraging builds a herbarium across the garden's gradient, from cultivated bed to spontaneous ditch-edge, seasonal petals and found materials pressed alongside.

Coring opens the ground itself, tracing the shift from worked soil to marine clay to peat - later filtered, stored, and re-wetted to let the buried seedbank surface.

From these readings, in exchange with ceramicist Esther Hoogendijk - whose practice makes time and natural forces visible in cast objects - the Index begins to take material form: a set of pieces meant to hold the garden's strata, its ground cover, and its rhythm of decay and return.

An Index in 4 registers

The Volkstuin Anchor
A vertical cast core reading the garden. From top to bottom: dark stratified soil at the base, from peat to clay - a sandy interface carrying paving aggregates of shell, tile, and brick - and above it the anthropic layer holding the small salvage of the plots cabin wood, wire, glass, petal and seeds.

The Archive
Tiles stored upright like tablets, each a horizontal section of the ground cover: the soil surface cast on one face, the imprint of the plants that grew through it on the other. A two-sided reading of the garden floor, bound in concrete mixed with the garden's own soil.

The Second Growth
An outdoor piece set into the ground, its base in mineral aggregate and its upper column cast in cement, threaded with dead wood and bark and cored with volkstuin compost soil. It is made to weather, and to feed its own slow return to earth. Here, decay and regeneration are held in a single object.

The Gardener Portraits
The dispersed piece: individual casts made with and for the each gardeners, each tied to a plot number. Here, the index is made personal, scattered back across the garden it came from, a mirror of the Volkstuin community.

The Volkstuin Index: Cultivated Lithopunctures is supported by the Amarte Fonds, hosted by Nature of Rotterdam at Volkstuinvereniging Tuinderslust, with artist Esther Hoogendijk as expert collaborator.