Iris Donders
wpZimmer resident in 2025
Iris Donders (Netherlands, 1992) is a transdisciplinary artist.
She is interested in exploring the relationships with(in) the more-than-human worlds, starting from material-based research. She traces the journey of these materials—their past, their present and the futures they might inhabit. Through this process, she unravels the stories embedded within them, questioning their transformations, geographic movements, and how we relate to them. In performance, installations, and cooking, these narratives unfold with a focus on sensorial experience.
Iris is a member of the NOON collective. The collective has created several performative installations and publications.Together, they experiment by hosting people into (fictional) spaces centered around relationality, ecology, and care. Recently they are creating a new piece and now the beginning is somewhere else, which brings you into a world based on variations around the logics of foam.
She is collaborating with Stef Assandri under the work title The Echoes of Silence. It’s a long-term research-creation project developed with transatlantic ingredients. Each stage of the process unfolds into different forms of sharing: readings, publications, installations, performances, dialogues, and dinners.
As a teacher, including BRONKS, she works with young children, guiding them to co-create performances through the use of materials while diving into their imagination and fantasy.
In 2021 she graduated as a Master of Autonomous Design in KASK, Ghent (BE). And Bachelor in Communication & Multimedia Design at HU University (NL).
projects
The Echoes of Silence (working title)
To migrate is to become entangled between wet tongues
through which words slip,
navigating verbs in parallel tenses.
The Echoes of Silence –working title– is a long-term research-creation project developed with transatlantic ingredients. Each stage of the process unfolds into different forms of sharing: readings, publications, installations, performances, dialogues, and dinners. The project seeks to weave networks of affinity through artistic practice, tracing a past-present narrative of migration. What are the echoes in the unfolding of a migration process? What do we cook when we are far from home?
Writing/reading takes the form of chronicles. Writing about migration becomes an exercise in thinking-and-doing with the whole body—a way of writing to “idear” (Anzaldúa, 2015). These textualities, together with cooking, form the core of this project. Writing/reading is done with the body, cooking is done with the body, and these actions give rise to somatic practices and gestures. Connecting migration with textualities and cooking activates conversations and embodies lived experiences of foreignness.
At the same time, –plant based– food acts as a way to soothe homesickness. The ingredients we cook will nourish this research both as a remedy and as a witness to the journeys they’ve traveled to reach our hands. Fruits and vegetables act as materials imbued with memory, archiving a story of migration and globalization.
The interest is to study these geographic movements and their relation to human migration, and to collect and write stories of migration and globalization.
Violence reproduces itself, twists and squeezes
during wordless service.
The silence at the service of history.
