Synergy series arrives in Amsterdamse Bos focusing on art inspired by and connected to nature.
Through a series of workshops and activations, people of all ages (from children to senior citizens across the Amsterdam area) will come together to create: musical instruments, large-scale inflatable artwork from recycled materials, and handmade paper from natural fibres… and much more.
Every sense will be engaged, forging a deeper connection between people and place, community and nature - true synergy in the heart of Amsterdamse Bos.
Museo Aero Solar
Created in collaboration with Aerocene Foundation, Museo Aero Solar is a collective artwork that transforms discarded plastic bags into a growing inflatable sculpture. Throughout the summer, people across Amsterdam have been invited to collect bags, contribute materials and take part in public workshops.
Rooted in collective responsibility and ecological imagination, the project explores how simple acts of making can bring people together. Here, the process itself becomes the artwork: everyday waste is collected, reused and transformed into something shared.
After travelling through the city and growing with each contribution, Museo Aero Solar now comes together at Amsterdamse Bos. See the largest sculpture yet, built from the materials and panels created collectively throughout the summer, and join the workshop to add to it yourself. Make a panel, write a message, leave your mark, and become part of what the project becomes next.
Lena Kuzmich
‘Photosynthesizer’ is a musical instrument that generates sound from the electrical output of cyanobacteria and microalgae during photosynthesis. The project explores how biological processes—specifically the photosynthetic activity of cyanobacteria—can be integrated into music-making, creating soundscapes that respond to environmental light. During photosynthesis, cyanobacteria produce electrons that can be measured and transformed into photo-reactive sound. By bringing non-human agencies into the creative process, ‘Photosynthesizer’ highlights the often intangible dynamics of biological life and light.
Created during residency at iii
Parker Hertzberger
Is a Dutch designer and artist who creates multisensory sound installations that turn music into a physical, tactile experience. Feel the vibrations of music through your entire body with the Music Hammock that transforms its fabric into a speaker, allowing your body to resonate directly with the sound.
Lying in it is like being inside a living instrument, an experience where music is felt as much as it is heard. Beyond personal relaxation, the work creates new possibilities for guest musicians, adding a sensory dimension to live performances.
Myra-Ida van der Veen
During this cheerful workshop, you’ll discover how to make your own frog instrument and learn to speak in secret croak language. Frogs are nature’s ultimate sound designers: with their clever croak sacs, they make their voices loud and filter out noise… a kind of natural noise-cancelling headphones. Artist Myra-Ida van der Veen is inspired by these talents and takes you into the world of sound experiments. Together, you’ll work with different materials to try out the craziest sounds.
At a large craft table in the grass, you’ll build your own kazoo—an instrument that can make your voice as loud as a frog’s. Once your masterpiece is finished, you’ll set off to send and receive Morse-like frog messages. Which vibrations make your kazoo the most fun?
Discover the magic of sound, become a master communicator, and transform into a super frog with your own secret frog code!
In partnership with iii
Akash Kumar
This is a hands-on workshop that explores the ecology of making through foraging, papermaking, and bookbinding. Together, we’ll gather materials from the landscape around iii, from algae to garden waste, and combine them with personal contributions brought by participants. Through experimental techniques, we’ll transform these found and foraged elements into handmade sheets of paper.
As the workshop unfolds, we will work with various raw materials of paper. In the final session, we will collectively stitch together a booklet, a tactile archive of place, process, and collaboration. Each page will carry a memory of material, site, and the hands that shaped it.
Participants will leave the workshop with a handmade booklet created from foraged and personal materials, stitched together as a collective record of place and process. Alongside their unique book, new skills in papermaking and bookbinding, and a deeper awareness of how the local environment can be transformed into meaningful artistic material. More than just objects, they’ll carry the shared experience of making, experimenting, and connecting with others through natural and found elements.
In partnership with iii
Sangmin Oh
Borrowed Skin (2026), explores how climate change leaves traces in the soil of the Amsterdamse Bos. Sangmin Oh approaches the ground not as something to study, but as an active collaborator that gives its own instructions: through color, moisture levels, and the buildup of organic layers.
During fieldwork, Sangmin collected sensory data about the soil and translated it into knitting patterns. When the ground is moist, loose openings appear in the fabric; when the ground is dry, the stitches pull tightly together. Sangmin also translates the underground network of roots, which forms the soil itself into a kind of organic fabric, into the entanglements of his yarn. The texture of the sculptures uniquely uncovers the condition of the soil.
The state of our soil materialises into textile sculptures that double as wearable costumes. In this way, the soil temporarily borrows the human body to make itself visible. Discover the Amsterdamse Bos as a living, ever-shifting terrain. Experience the impact of climate change firsthand, through textile, body, and movement.
The work is part of The Invisible Visible, a free art route in the Amsterdam Bos (Gemeente Amsterdam).
Programme Info
The Invisible Visible
A free art route in the Amsterdam Bos (Gemeente Amsterdam).
From September 2026, the temporary outdoor exhibition makes the hidden world of the Amsterdamse Bos visible and tangible: from fungal threads and soil life to climate, biodiversity and the mutual interconnectedness of ecosystems. Seven makers invite you to slow down and to experience nature as a living network where we ourselves are part of.
To be seen are among others a living structure of pruned wood and mycelium of Pim van de Noort & Dasha Tsapenko, textile climate landscapes of Sangmin Oh, the data-driven listening horn of Henk Schut, a forest bath of Jasper Koopmans, the soil archive of Sigrid Bannenberg, the visual soil installation Living Soil of Inside Outside in collaboration with Naturalis, WUR and VU, and a film about worldwide fungal networks of Marleine van der Werf with Toby Kiers.
The art route opens exclusively during Synergy Art Festival on 4 September 2026.
At 17:30 departs a tour from the grounds in direction of the artworks, which stand in the vicinity of the Bostheater.
Announcement