Vita Nova Doolhoven

<Vita Nova Doolhoven> stems from an in-depth research of the unique cultural heritage of the 17th-century Dutch Republic—Doolhoven. Its research axis compares the forces that shaped seventeenth-century Amsterdam—urban expansion, migration, and religious oppression—with analogous pressures in contemporary Amsterdam, asking how older regimes of exclusion mutate into new cultural and administrative forms. The labyrinth becomes an apparatus for sensing how persecution not only controls belief and representation, but also reorganizes ecology.

Through reconstructing the three-section ritual itinerary of the Oude Doolhof and introducing Himalayan water/earth-related folk traditions, the project integrates and recomposes “forgotten” conceptions of life and cosmology displaced by religious and cultural suppression, while countering the mechanistic time-devices and linear progress narratives embedded in Enlightenment technic regimes. In this sense, the doolhof is re-staged not as spectacle or control, but as a cosmotechnical prototype: a mandala-like pathway in which identity is dynamic and relational, multiple cultural lineages interweave without collapsing into a single origin story, and nonhuman regeneration becomes thinkable as a shared, ongoing process.

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Vita Nova Doolhoven