Kyra Nijskens (The Netherlands)

In her practice Kyra Nijskens explores how human activity reshapes ecological landscapes and the forms of life that emerge in these altered environments. She works with industrial debris, organic materials, and found objects as carriers of memory, adaptation, and change. Through sculpture and poetic writing, she investigates the tensions and interdependencies between natural processes and human-made systems.

She is drawn to organisms and bodies that exist in the margins of human infrastructures, and how they adapt to environments they were never meant to inhabit, finding ways to persist within systems that often reject them. In their resistance to clear distinctions between native and invasive, natural and artificial, human and non-human, Nijskens recognises a queer way of navigating the world, where survival is sustained through hybridity rather than conformity. By following processes of attachment, migration, and regeneration, she explores bodies as porous and relational rather than fixed or autonomous, continuously reshaped through encounters with industries and other forms of life.