Mathijs Stegink

Tag: participatory

  • Cardboarders: Massive Collaborative Cardboard Arenas

    Cardboarders: Massive Collaborative Cardboard Arenas

    Cardboarders is a participatory cardboard art collective that is working from Amsterdam. I was initiator and am now artistic lead and facilitator. We love to create large-scale, crowd-constructed cardboard arena’s where visitors collectively build characters, props, challenges, environments, games and battles.

    Selection of materialisations: Defqon.1, Lowlands, Wildeburg, Playgrounds Festival, Smeerboel, Hemeltjelief, Awakenings, Milkshake, Kopfestival, Discovery Festival, Night of the Nerds, Dutch Game Week.


    We also facilitate workshops.

  • Bamboebios

    Bamboebios

    Artistic lead of the Bamboebios: a festival cinema and interactive playground at Wildeburg (2022–ongoing). Featuring improvised talk shows, trip-guided drawing, clowns, camera toys, performances, and endless short films and animation.

  • Betastingsdienst (cancelled due to covid)

    Betastingsdienst (cancelled due to covid)

    We don’t want to dwell on all the cancelled projects of 2021, but this one would have been amazing. Lowlands was preparing the first festival where people could hug freely again. We designed a special hugging zone, mimicking official COVID flowcharts, announcements, and crowd control—but then completely subverting the “do not touch anyone” message that had dominated our lives.

    In our immersive lab, we created a playful environment with hug superspreaders to help people relearn how to hug. This project would have been another experiential art installation emphasizing audience participation, co-creation, and the “as if” quality of a fake lab. We love the approach of a fictional workshop or mock institute, where the line between reality and performance is joyfully blurred.
    It was not meant to be 🙂