Nature's Narrative
Last year, we dedicated an entire day of the festival to it: Nature’s Narrative – the story nature wants to tell, but that we humans find so hard to hear. But one day was never going to be enough. This is a conversation we need to continue, which is why Nature’s Narrative has now become a fully-fledged programme line within Exploring Stories. After all, nature cannot be contained in a single afternoon. This year, we want to listen more attentively – to all the stories nature offers us in rustling leaves, cracking ice, melting silence, birdsong, or deafening stillness.
Once again, we ask ourselves: what does it mean to give voice to nature? Last year, we explored the many ways we as humans might begin to listen to the more-than-human world. This year, we focus on what such listening demands of us. Because if you really listen, you also hear pain – the pain of ecological devastation, political decisions, and structural exploitation. Nature’s Narrative might make our ears ache a little. But perhaps that ache is a call to action.
These programmes create space for stories beyond the human perspective – and reflect on the responsibility we carry as humans. How can we speak on behalf of nature without drowning it out? What kind of language might allow us not only to represent non-human life, but to protect it? Can literature, activism and philosophy truly challenge the dominant worldview in which the Earth is seen merely as a resource?
Within Nature’s Narrative, we hear voices that question – and redraw – the boundary between human and nature. Voices unafraid to confront us with uncomfortable truths. Voices that remind us that connection and repair are, in fact, possible. In conversations with, among others, Sunil Amrith, Bibi Dumon Tak, Arita Baaijens, and Roxane van Iperen, we ask how nature tells its story – and whether we, as humans, are even capable of hearing it. And if we can listen: will we hear only cries of alarm, or also the music of another possible future?
Talks & performances
Sunil Amrith & Roxane van Iperen on the dark side of progress
What does the way we treat our planet say about the way we treat each other? What is human freedom worth if it comes at the expense of the planet? And how far does our responsibility extend: to our backyard, or to the other side of the world?
In his book The Burning Earth (2024) Singapore-raised historian Sunil Amrith, a lecturer at Yale University, interweaves the history of climate change with that of colonialism, migration, and exploitation. He shows that ecocide and genocide are often closely related; human freedom and technological progress are often built on the disruption of ecosystems and human lives in specific parts of the world. In other words, where the earth is exploited, people are almost always exploited too. Amrith takes a holistic view of things and pays a lot of attention to the global south. He also writes with surprising clarity and compellingness about impossibly large topics such as global food supply and migration flows.
As far as we are concerned, it is a match made on Earth, therefore, that Amrith will be talking to Roxane van Iperen during Exploring Stories. In recent years, she too has often wondered aloud where our responsibility for large and smaller ecosystems begins and ends. In her pamphlet Eigen planeet eerst (2025), she explores why our democracy seems to have no answer to the greatest crisis of our time. Could it be that democracy itself is crippling us and pushing us to the brink of disaster? While Amrith looks at the bigger picture, Van Iperen focuses specifically on the West's inability to change structurally. After all, we also know her as the writer who so sharply dissected our Western welfare paradox and showed how we have stumbled from a belief in progress to conservatism disguised as self-care.
Bibi Dumon Tak & Tijl Nuyts on animal voices and underground revolutions
Note on language: this talk will be in Dutch
What does it take to truly mirror ourselves in animals—and what do we see then? What can mosquitoes or naked mole rats, to name just two species, teach us about loneliness, coexistence, and resistance?
In Rimpeling (2024) by Bibi Dumon Tak (1964), the eccentric Marthe falls down the stairs while trying to save the life of a crane fly. Marthe lives in isolation on the edge of the forest and has little contact with other people. However, she feels a strong connection to the animals in and around her home—mice, pigeons, insects—and even the objects around her seem to have a soul: side tables, drawers that no longer close properly, a forgotten marble. After Marthe's death, Dumon Tak gives a voice to everything that remains: animals and objects come to life and paint an intimate portrait of a woman and a world in which even the smallest things have meaning.
Tijl Nuyts (1991) also shows how humans and animals are inextricably linked. In his debut novel Grondwerk, we follow a society of naked mole rats, deep beneath the Vaderlandsplein in Brussels. There, in a network of tunnels full of conspiracies and visions of the future, a story unfolds about resistance, collective action, and the need for shared ground. Nuyts sketches an Animal Farm-like world in which the revolution beneath the earth is not only a mirror of humanity, but also a warning: we simply cannot do without each other.
Arita Baaijens - What does the sea tell us? (mini-lecture)
Note on language: this lecture will be in Dutch
What would the North Sea have to tell us if we were to engage in serious conversation with it? And why do we do so rarely? In the Netherlands, we tame rivers, draw straight lines across the landscape, and consider the sea our property. This bossy attitude also seeps into our language. But what if we no longer saw nature as a backdrop or resource, but as a full-fledged conversation partner? In her idiosyncratic book In gesprek met de Noordzee (In conversation with the North Sea), writer and explorer Arita Baaijens explores how to give a voice to something that, in principle, cannot speak. During this mini-lecture, Baaijens lets us hear what the voice of the North Sea can sound like if you take the trouble to listen. You will engage in conversation with the sea and enrich your vocabulary with maritime language.