Floriade Expo 2022 in Almere is coming to an end. For six months, the attention to the theme ‘Growing Green Cities’ has been focused on the cities of the future.
During the event, visitors were invited to ‘explore, touch and change’ at what will be the start of a new city district close to Amsterdam in the Netherlands, Almere. Many of the structures created for the exhibition will become a permanent part of the new community.
In addition, there was a rich selection of arts and cultural events taking place during Floriade Expo 2022. Sandra van Beers, the cultural programme manager of the Expo, spoke to blooloop about what visitors enjoyed at the expo and the goal of the arts and culture programme.
A career in music
Van Beers started her career in music festivals, she explains:
“Ten years ago, the Floriade expo was held in Venlo, which is where had been working, organising music festivals, since finishing my studies at university. They asked me to join the expo as a producer for the music programme over there. That’s how I got enrolled in the Floriade and the World Expo business. I was involved for five years in the run-up to the Expo.”
Floriade 2012 was the nineteenth AIPH world horticultural exhibition and the sixth Floriade. Held from April 5 to October 7, 2012, the expo’s theme and slogan was ‘Be part of the theatre in nature; get closer to the quality of life’.
“I then travelled for a year,” she adds. “Then I went back into the music festival business for a couple of years. When I became a little bit older, in my thirties, I started working for a children’s film festival called Cinekid for four or five years, which I enjoyed.”
Culture in the community
At around this time, she started doing freelance work in the cultural sector in Amsterdam:
“As well as Cinekid, I also worked for a lot of different festivals, but the emphasis changed from just music to a more cultural scene. I did a digital art festival, for example, with a whole community of hippies doing art in a famous area of Amsterdam called Ruigoord.”
Ruigoord is a creative village surrounded by an industrial harbour atmosphere just outside Amsterdam. In 1973, the abandoned village was squatted by a group of artists from Amsterdam and has since become a small but flourishing community. It has been the source of many major Dutch creative movements and continues to play a central role in Amsterdam’s underground art scene.
Van Beers’ role was to build a bridge between the Ruigoord Community and the Municipality and restore the damaged relationship in terms of festival permits.
“I worked there for a while,” she says. “I also did some work for We Are Public.”
We Are Public is an art and culture community initiative where, for €17 a month, participants get free access to an exciting selection of daily events at over 400 cultural venues across Amsterdam, The Hague, North Brabant, Haarlem, Leiden, Delft, Utrecht and Amersfoort. The programme features theatre, dance, music, film, opera, literature and visual arts, hand-picked by an independent team of curators.
Working with Floriade
While she was working for Cinekid and We Are Public, she was contacted by Floriade:
“It was a little over two years ago. They said, ‘Would you be interested in working at the Floriade Cultural Department?’
“I agreed to talk with them. At the last Floriade, I had been mainly focused on the music programme, and on producing all the music activities. I said that while I would be very interested in doing it again, I would really be interested in curating the whole programme. They agreed.
“It was a great opportunity for me to work at the world expo again.”
A six-month-long event
The Floriade Expo lasts for six months, which is a long time to sustain the excitement and energy.
She explains:
“I started with a program, a scheme, that we fill out every day. I said, ‘We need two theatre shows at our expo; one for children, and one, also very family orientated, as the main show.’ We started by organising that. Because the expo site was bigger than ever, I realised we also needed a music programme. It was important to create an atmosphere throughout the park, and music is a large part of that.”
This meant she had to schedule three different music acts every day:
“So, we did that. We also needed an art programme, of course, and some specials for people that live nearby and want to come by now and then, and to choose their days according to which special events are taking place.”
Having set up a framework, they started filling it:
“One of my assignments was to present the culture of the province of Flevoland at the expo. I always look at it both ways. In a world expo, which Floriade is, there are lots of countries presenting themselves to the people of Flevoland. But we can do it the other way around, as well. It is a unique opportunity for all these cultural organisations and programmes to present themselves to the world. At the same time, they meet all the different cultures at the expo site, all the people from different countries.
“The province of is presenting itself to the world, but also the world is presenting itself in the province of Flevoland.”
Programming arts and culture for Floriade Expo 2022
In terms of filling the programme, she says:
“Almere, where the expo takes place, and the whole province of Flevoland, has a very rich and high-quality theatre scene. I was very blessed with that because it meant we could create an opening show with an amazing theatre company called Vis à Vis. They did a really big spectacular outdoor show.”
Instead of organising this at the expo site, van Beers decided to stage it in the city centre, at the waterfront:
“In fact,” she adds: “The whole thing was performed in and on the water. It was a great way of opening the expo, and involving the people of Almere, showing we wanted them all to be part of it.”
The Vis à Vis Theatre Company is renowned for its big, spectacular outdoor performances.
“They always surprise the audience with a lot of mechanical engineering elements, and a lot of things going on at the same time. Something is always happening everywhere. It’s very high energy, very spectacular. We loved what they proposed to us.”
The Vis à Vis opening spectacle, enacted on an industrial pontoon with pumping bellows, expanding gauges, air compressors blowing off steam, and horns honking, was directed by Marianne Seine and Rutger Buiter. Kicking off the cultural programme in a show rich in slapstick and reflecting the expo’s eco-conscious theme, the show featured a young heroine very reminiscent of Greta Thunberg, who contrived to defeat the money-hungry petrochemical tycoon by enlisting the help of the Flevoland children.
“It was a great opening. Then there is a closing light show, running in the last week, incorporating some of the elements from the opening show – a light spectacular on the lake.”
Helping to explore the key themes at Floriade Expo 2022
Concerning the expo’s theme, ‘Growing Green Cities’, van Beers comments:
“We have a half-hour children’s show twice a day, by BonteHond, which is also a children’s theatre company from Almere.
“They focused on the guilt that a lot of kids experience when it comes to climate change, feeling that they don’t do enough – it’s a big pressure for them. BonteHond created a funny show that deals with these topics. During the show, the audience – adults as well as children – laugh hysterically, because it’s crazy funny. The issues are presented in such a light way, but it nevertheless brings something that will have kids thinking later.”
The main show is by the Ulrike Quade Company:
“They created a beautiful little fairy tale that they perform twice a day. It’s about a robot – they built a real robot – that falls in love with a flower. The flower is played by a modern dancer. It’s a very cute little story, with no words, only dance music. It’s a short main show, but I’m proud of it.”
Outlining the theme behind the main show, she adds:
“For mankind to succeed and make progress in this world, we need to fall in love with nature again. This play shows that symbolic moment where nature and technology have found their way.”
An iconic statue
Another breathtaking aspect of Floriade is the statue. She says:
“I wanted to have one iconic statue that everybody would recognise afterwards as the statue that was at the Floriade expo. We asked Florentijn Hofman, the artist who is best known by many as the creator of the giant inflatable yellow duck sculptures that appeared in cities around the world. I thought if anyone could do a big gesture, it would be him.”
The sculpture Hofman created for Floriade is a 10-metre depiction of a grandparent holding a grandchild. The figures are made up of the shapes of 10,000 steel bees.
“He was inspired by the bee beards done by beekeepers in the past. They would put the queen bee on their chin, and thousands of bees would cluster onto him, like a beard of bees. And they would hold competitions to see which beekeeper could get the biggest beard.”
In this sculpture, the artist has given most of the bees happy little faces:
“But some of the faces are not happy,” van Beers says. “He’s also alerting people to the bee problem through his sculpture. Bees are not doing very well at this point. We need to create a better environment for them because if the bees die, we will also die.”
Hidden among the 10,000 bees is one queen bee:
“We always challenge people to find the queen!”
After Floriade Expo 2022
After Floriade Expo 2022, the goal is for the site to become a residential area – complete with a (currently empty) bus lane that has become a community art project, transforming Hortus Avenue into a work of art more than 700 metres long: one of the largest works of art in the world.
“We asked the artist Farida Sedoc to create a pattern for this bus lane. Then, together with all the children that visit, the whole bus lane is painted throughout Floriade.”
Flevoland is known for its land art.
“It was impossible to create a new land art item at our site because they require so much space. But it was something I wanted to address, so I asked the Belgian environmental artist Will Beckers to do a whole collection on the Floriade. He created six different works from natural elements.”
Creating an international programme
Beckers is an environmental artist known internationally for his site-specific installations and public artworks that show a dialogue and relationship between culture, nature and the environment. For Floriade, one of the pieces he created is a Horn of Wishes, facing the lake:
“We came up with the idea because we wanted something for the schools that visited us. We wanted them to do a workshop, and then create a wish for nature. They can now shout through this horn of wishes over the water. We put an echo system in it, so it records what you say, and then it will shout it back at you.
“People have been lining up to be able to say something in the horn of wishes. We decided it needed to be available to everybody, not just the schools. It has proved such a success that the municipality of Almere has called me to say that they want to buy it. So, it will become a permanent feature.”
33 countries are celebrating their National Day cultural programmes on the Floriade main stage.
Van Beers adds:
“One of my favourite parts of organising expos is getting to work with all these different countries and cultures and collaborating on creating a programme with them. It’s a chance to travel the world, on one site.”
