We Plant Strange Forests Day 2
WORM invites you to a multimedia reflection on urban life, intimacy and alienation in our very own S/ash Gallery. From January 15 until January 17, five Masters’ students from Piet Zwart Institute will exhibit their work exploring how human beings relate to the environments we built together over generations.
How intimate do you feel with your city, and why? How much does it alienate you, and how? Where do your feet feel heavy and where do you get a spring in your step? Is your house a home? Is your street a neighbourhood? Do you feel more at home online or offline? How many passers-by smiled at you today? This exhibition brings together photography and videography reflecting on such questions. The independent zine A Tool For People To See will also be available to read on-site, inviting visitors to slow down and reimagine urban space beyond productivity.
We Plant Strange Forests opens on Thursday January 15, 2026 at 15:00.
Thurs. 15th of January 15:00-20:00
Fri. 16th of January 15:00-20:00
Sat. 17th of January 15:00-20:00
Adress: Boomgaardsstraat 69 in WORM Rotterdam
Maria Napiórkowska
Mania Napiórkowska is a Polish graphic designer and illustrator based in Rotterdam. Her practice lives somewhere between play and observation. Working primarily with publications and paper-based forms, she looks for moments of pause, and connection within the city – the joys, dreams, and beauty that coexist with loneliness and everyday absurdities. She recently graduated from the Experimental Publishing program at the Piet Zwart Institute, where she focused on the performative dimensions of design. Her work asks how a publication can move, travel, or be experienced together. What happens when a publication is shared rather than kept, or only makes sense when experienced collectively? Through these questions, she investigates how formats and experiences can shape connection and bring ideas into public space in playful, accessible, and engaging ways.
Liu Siyan
Liu Siyan is a visual artist whose practice spans still and moving images, engaging both mediums through a contemplative approach to layering and resonance. Rooted in her distinct visual philosophy, her work meditates on the fragile connections between human presence and the vast scale of the cosmic order. Guided by a poetic minimalist sensibility, she cultivates a mode of visual listening that traces connections between inner consciousness and outer worlds. Through this dual engagement, her practice invites viewers into awareness of space within the context of relational entanglement. She is currently pursuing her Master’s in Lens‐Based Media at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam.
Yuan Yuan
Yuan Yuan works with writing, moving images and photography. Their practice often begins with fragmentary nuances of thought and feeling, moving through themes such as queerness, marginalization, anti-anthropocentric narratives and the tensions between belonging and displacement. She projects this process into surrounding landscapes, turning them into transcendental dreamscapes. Their recent research focuses on trauma as a thread, working with elements like water as metaphors to express how our sense of identity is subconsciously questioned within the landscapes we construct. Yuan’s work has been exhibited in Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taipei, Berlin, New York, and Rotterdam and their collaborative film is currently on display at the 36th Bienal de São Paulo.
Xuetong Jin
Xuetong Jin is a Beijing-born, Rotterdam-based filmmaker and lens-based artist whose work focuses on the tension between intimacy and isolation. In her hands, displacement become a critical tool. After working as a commercial producer for fashion media, she relocated to the Netherlands as a "drifter.” Since living in Rotterdam, Xuetong has found herself unable to have a deep connection with the city’s efficient, organized surface. Instead of participating, she adopts a detached “God’s eye view”, observing the urban landscape from a psychological distance. She walks around the city, but her gaze hovers above it – watching the performative nature of people, and the cold indifference of modern buildings. Her work captures this alienation through a calm, restrained aesthetic, using shadow and deep-focus lens to explore the spaces where she feels present but unseen. She wants to use her camera to question the way an individual navigates the vast, alienating structures of a new society.
Elli Lymperopoluu
ellien (elli Lymperopoulou) is a Greek creative born in the city of Patras, Greece in 2000. Her interests revolve around the flesh, nature, colours as/and symbols and the relationship between bodies and time. She currently resides in Rotterdam where she studies Lens Based Media at Piet Zwart Institute. Her work focuses on practical and theoretical artistic research around the concept of video performance and the philosophical aspects of this medium. Through it she pursues understanding of phenomenology of perception and the collective unconscious. She aims to bridge the gap between philosophy, nature and the contemporary human experience through the lenses of neurodivergence, self-reflection and existential trauma. Her “happy places” are natural environments where she can take a step back from the world, relax and better reflect on her practice, daydream and generate new questions.
