What does the world look like behind the infrastructure that makes our everyday lives possible, while at the same time having an enormous impact on people, nature, and the landscapes of the future?

Sites is an international art and research project in which artists and researchers from the Netherlands and the United States travel together to places where energy, resources, and global logistics converge. For this first edition, the group spends a week traveling from Tata Steel in IJmuiden and the petrochemical industry in the Port of Rotterdam to the energy and data landscape of Eemshaven.

Taking a reflective approach, the group explores how these often invisible systems shape our landscapes and everyday lives — and how they influence our present and our future. Through observation, conversations, documentation, and mapping, the participants investigate the infrastructures that underpin contemporary life.

On Friday, October 2, the Sites Research Group presents the first results of this collective journey at WEP. As is customary with SEEN, the presentation has been developed over the course of one week by a group brought together in a composition that has never worked together in this way before.

Expect an experimental installation featuring images, maps, materials, and stories that together form a growing archive of the journey. An invitation to look at the infrastructures that connect us from a different perspective — and to explore what lies beneath, above, and behind our everyday lives.

For this edition, the Sites Research Group consists of:
Tom Schram | Artist/Researcher | David Orr Belcher College of Fine and Performing Arts, Western Carolina University (USA)
Forest Kelley | Artist/Researcher | College of Fine Arts, University of Kentucky (USA)
James Enos | Artist/Researcher | College of Fine Arts, Texas Christian University (USA)
Annie Simpson | Artist/Researcher/Essayist | 2024-25, Fellow, Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative (USA)
Kevin Groothuizen | Researcher/Cultural Space Developer | Groningen (NL)
Jan Derk Diekema | Artist/Researcher/Cultural Space Developer | Groningen (NL)