Online Open Studio & Presentation

Online Open Studio & Presentation – Artists in Residency for Artist-parents
Thursday, 7th of May · 2 p.m. – 3:30 p.m. on Teams

We are delighted to invite you to the online presentation of our Artists in Residency programme for parent artists — a new, dedicated initiative by The Artist and the Others that offers mentorship-based support to artists who are also parent, allowing them to develop their creative research and professional career alongside their parenting lives.

The participating artists – Puck Verkade, Proyecto Cocuyo and LI Yuchen – have conducted their research during the 3 month residency period and will present their outcomes online, engaging with a broader audience.

The Residency for Artist-Parents marked its first edition, and it is the first project totally tailored to support artists who are also parents.

Programme

2 pm : Welcome
2.10 Presentation of the artists’ research by Puck Verkade, Proyecto Cocuyo and LI Yuchen  in conversation with The Artist and the Others
3 pm: Q&A with the audience.

The event is free and open to all.

It would be wonderful to have you with us to celebrate the research and creative journeys of these inspiring artist-parents.

About the Artists:

Puck Verkade

Puck Verkade is a Dutch artist and arts educator based in Berlin. She creates installations, sculptures, and videos that draw viewers into surreal, cartoon-like worlds where comedy and critique intertwine.

Playful, subversive and toying with the absurd, Puck Verkade’s films awaken a magical world that lures the viewer in and then confuses them, making the undertone of the work haunting and uncomfortable. Through a surrealist gaze she revises archetypal narratives that shape the social systems we have created for ourselves. The wider themes Verkade engages with in her work conjure up the complex relations between the inner and outer worlds, ranging from the questions of accountability and complicity, to reproductive rights, bodily agency and consent. All rather layered subjects that she approaches with sincere curiosity and humorist sensibility.

Verkade’s hybrid characters exist somewhere in-between animal and human, camouflage and drag, fact and fiction. A confused pigeon, an inner demon, a frustrated housefly, a curious ancestor; these protagonists reflect the various personas we carry inside us and how they always find a way to the surface despite our best attempts to suppress them. They have uneasy or unwanted questions to ask out loud, and Verkade’s topsy-turvy and cartoon-like worlds leave space to consider less binary answers.

Verkade received her BFA from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague and completed an MFA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, London. Her work has been shown at various international venues, including the 16e Biennale de Lyon; the Yokohama Triennale, Japan; Multi Media Art Triennial Beijing, China; C5CNM, Beijing, China; Artissima Art Fair in Turin; Wroclaw Contemporary Museum in Poland; IKOB Museum, Eupen, Belgium; De Nederlandsche Bank, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; LISTE Art Fair and Kunstmuseum Gegenwart Basel. She was selected as a 2017-2018 resident artist at Sarabande The Lee Alexander McQueen Foundation in London. In 2021 she received the prestigious Charlotte Koehler Prize from the Prins Bernhard Culture Fund in The Netherlands.

Install view ‘Uprooted’ (2023-ongoing), video installation 07:21min., installed at De Nederlandsche Bank, Amsterdam 2025-2026. Courtesy of the artist & Durst Britt & Mayhew. Photography by G.J. Van Rooij

Proyecto Cocuyo

‘Cocuyo’ is a local firefly that shines in the night in South America. It is an art collective by Ana Tomimori and Carlos Guzmán.
For seven years they lived in a mountain in the middle of a foggy forest, in the small town of Cachipay, Colombia. In there they managed a smallholding shade grown coffee farm and an Art Residency called ‘Cocuyo’.
They were moved to this place by the hope that emerges through the country after the signed of the “Peace agreement” between FARC rebels and the Colombian government that ended a fifty-two year of internal conflict. In this place they restored and lived in a traditional coffee house that was once the home of Carlos’ grandpar- ents, became parents, managed the coffee production and created the “Cocuyo Coffee”, a small-scale product distributed in organic stores in the city.

Through their daily life they could understand the side of the growers, the knowledge it involves and the challenges it engages while seeing the impacts of climate change on coffee production. With actions, publications, workshops, and collective exhibitions, they seek to share their experience while presenting the challenges of practicing small- scale, organic, conscious agriculture and thinking about an authonoumous project. Nowadays Cocuyo have been reflecting on their life in the countryside, its relation to colonialism and the other side of the coffee supply chain.

Ana Tomimori

Being a Brazilian citizen with a Japanese background makes the artist question those two different cultures that inhabit her. This shapes her way of thinking in multiple directions and makes her ask how different things or thoughts can be related. Memories and hidden histories are common paths which the artist walks in her practice. Through sculptures, photography and video, the multimedia artist explores how her personal life is crossed by political, historical and geographical situations.

She has been co-founder of Cocuyo Residency since 2020, curator of the online exhibition ‘Puerperio 2023, Co), and organiser of ‘Plataforma Performance Festival’ (2010, Br). She worked for ten years in artistic education for children (Social Projects; Hospital Psiquiátrico São Pedro; Private Schools) and participated in exhibitions and artistic residencies in South America and at the JVE Academie 2023–2024 in the Netherlands.

Carlos Guzmán

Guzmán observe and edit subtracting images that already exist, forgotten archives that revive, pasts that are renewed, updated and survive. His artistic practice is dedicated to the research on «cinematic montage» and its relation with the writing of history, the ability it has to establish elements of reality. For fifteen years he has been building a multimedia practice addressing various projects from video, analog film media, sound files, photography and urban intervention. Guzmán is also the co-director of the Cocuyo Art Residence, a project founded in partnership with the Brazilian artist Ana Tomimori.

1750 cups of Coffee, Poster to advertise the sale of coffee at a fair price (Riso Print, 42X59,4 2024) Photo Courtesy of the artists.

LI Yuchen

LI Yuchen’s practice traces migration, identity, and decolonial healing, asking what it means to belong beyond divides of skin and passports. LI explores diasporic belonging rooted in the land we inhabit, reweaving relations with the more-than-human worlds, the stories, the mystery and magic.

LI uses art to exit the modern singular story of “progress” — a trajectory of extraction and alienation. She approaches her artworks as sites of encounter: spaces where we enter the lives of others across difference through personal narratives, lived experiences, and embodied knowledges. These encounters become gestures toward plural worlds, toward renewed kinship with Earth. From food as witness to colonial trade, to encounters in Tanzania between Chinese diaspora and local communities, and rerooting practices connecting Dutch sacred sites with Iku knowledge from Colombia, she works interdisciplinarily across video, installation, performance, and collaborative processes, weaving constellations of stories to re-member hidden narratives and displaced ways of living.

LI’s work is rooted in embodied knowledge—the deep memories and wisdom stored in our Earth-bodies, communal bodies, and relational bodies. She explores how these knowledges can be awakened and woven into collective participation, through shared storytelling and mutual learning. Her installations, videos, and performances are sites of encounter, where the dynamics of meeting “the Other” are explored with curiosity and care. By intertwining her own stories into the encounters, LI invites viewers to reflect on their own positions within the web of life and to consider how we might build kinship across differences. Her work is not about providing answers but about opening spaces for collective transformation, where the world can be experienced anew through restored relationships and reclaimed magic.

LI Yuchen (1991) is a mother, artist, cultural organizer, and community builder. Working across disciplines, she has a background in biology, marketing, fine arts, and theater. Li’s work has been presented internationally at institutions including Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven, Casco Art Institute Utrecht, and TarraWarra Museum Australia, among others.

LI Yuchen is a member of the Weaving Realities collective, where she engages in food performances and workshops that deepen our connection to Earth, a member of Pluriversity Weavers to learn and unlearn with the indigenous Iku community and the co-founder of Asian Movie Night, a roaming film project that explores the plurality of Asian identities and cultures through cinema and dialogue. Through these collaborative endeavors, LI continues to explore art as a practice of decolonial world-making, reenchantment, and the reimagining of relational worlds.

The Elemental Atlas, Installation view at Art Rotterdam, Foto: Tommy Smits

The project is supported by the Mondriaan Fonds, Het Cultuurfonds and Stichting Oda Park.