Designing the Social
Rudy Guedj
With a practice that spans over a variety of mediums ranging from book and exhibition design to drawing, writing or installation, Rudy Guedj (b. 1988, France) explores the associative processes that often lie behind the construction of narratives. Next to his work as a graphic designer, he publishes books under the imprint Building Fictions. This publishing project sets out to explore ‘building’ as a methodology, with the intent to highlight the potential of storytelling within practices at the intersection of art, design, architecture, literature.
Hetty Berens
Hetty Berens is an architecture historian and a curator at Het Nieuwe Instituut and Sonneveld House. She is responsible for acquisitions and collections research. She also curates exhibitions, writes and lectures. She curated the presentation Simultaneous Modernism in Sonneveld House and curated an exhibition about De Stijl in Gemeentemuseum Den Haag with works from the collection of Het Nieuwe Instituut.
Tabea Nixdorff
Tabea Nixdorff’s practice involves writing, book design, publishing, reading performances and collaborative learning. Trained in typography, her works often explore margins—both as a social and medial locality—and in voicing and highlighting gendered absences and omissions in established Western historic narratives. In both her independent and collaborative projects, research and archives play an essential role; taking ephemeral material culture as an entry point to explore new methods of knowledge sharing.
Setareh Noorani
Setareh Noorani is an architect, researcher, zinester, and part of experimental music collective Zenevloed. In her projects and creative involvements, she uses various media to explore ways of unfolding and embodying, questioning processes of trauma and time, always in the grey space between academic and artistic research. Her current research at Het Nieuwe Instituut focuses on qualitative, paradigm-shifting notions of decoloniality, feminisms, queer ecologies, agencies (non-institutional, non-authorship), and implications of the collective, more-than-human body in architecture, its heritage and its multivocal futures, as part of the new project Collecting Otherwise and the cross-institutional The Critical Visitor.
Marleen Stikker
Marleen Stikker (b. 1962) is founder of Waag and 'De Digitale Stad' (The Digital City) (1993), the first virtual community introducing free public access to the Internet in Amsterdam. She leads Waag, a social enterprise that consists of a research institute for creative technologies and social innovation and Waag Products, that launched companies like Fairphone, the first fair smartphone in the world. She is also member of the European H2020 Commission High-level Expert Group for SRIA on innovating Cities/DGResearch and the Dutch AcTI academy for technology & innovation.
Simone C. Niquille
Simone C. Niquille is a Swiss designer and researcher. Her practice Technoflesh investigates the representation of identity without a body, the digitisation of biomass and the increasingly omnipresent optic gaze of everyday objects. She received a BFA in Graphic Design from Rhode Island School of Design in Providence USA in 2010 and graduated with a Masters in Visual Strategies from the Sandberg Institute Amsterdam in 2013. She is part of design research collective Space Caviar and Tutor at the Architectural Association London.
TNL! In the Works
Take a look behind-the-scenes at Het Nieuwe Instituut and think along with research, exhibitions and programmes that are currently in the works.