Marres Garden Festival 2026

Stadstuin

De tuin van Marres is met ca. 1000 mde grootste openbare stadstuin van Maastricht. Op 12 en 13 juni nodigt Marres je uit om workshops te volgen over al het moois dat dit stukje verborgen natuur te bieden heeft.

Moss
Nature-conscious workshop and sensory tent

by Anneke Wubbolts

Free entrance

Discover the magic of moss! As appreciation for nature wanes, so does the willingness to take climate action; the Moss project explores this through a sensory installation of moss that promotes tranquility, mindfulness, and respect for nature, followed by a workshop in which participants use natural, biodegradable materials to create temporary artworks that return to the earth, thereby strengthening the relationship between humans and nature.

While studying visual communication in Maastricht, Anneke Wubbolts learned to look at art, creators, and the world around her in a new way. After graduating, she founded her own company, studio KEANS. In her work, she combines various media and techniques to make social themes accessible and stimulate dialogue. Through this, she aims to spark awareness and forge new connections.

Date:

Friday, 12 June, 2026

Project Moss will also be on display on June 13!

Time:

5:30—8PM

Entrance:

Free

Language:

Dutch

Group size:

20 persons

Location:

Marres city garden
Capucijnenstraat 98, Maastricht
Please check in at the front desk first!

Free tickets
Marres’ garden around 1950

Hidden Stories of the Garden
Guided tour on history and green heritage

by Angelina Valleau

Discover the hidden layers of Marres’s urban garden and join us in exploring its history, value, and future, gaining practical knowledge and insights along the way.

Angelina Valleau (1971) is an expert in built heritage and its sustainability, with a growing specialization in green heritage: an often-overlooked aspect of historic preservation. Drawing on her “Green Heritage” program at Utrecht University of Applied Sciences, she focuses on analyzing, evaluating, and future-proofing historic gardens and landscapes.

Date:

Saturday, 13 June, 2026

Time:

10—11PM

Entrance:

Day pass for Saturday: €15
This includes:
– Guided tour by Angelina Valleau
– Workshop (including lunch) by Wilgenvrouwen
– Performance by Plantelectra Orchestra

Language:

Dutch

Group size:

20 persons

Location:

Marres city garden
Capucijnenstraat 98, Maastricht
Please check in at the front desk first!

Day pass for Saturday, 13 June, 2026
Wilgenvrouwen garden in Sibbe

The Willow Women Project (Wilgenvrouwen)
Alchemical & Cyclical Garden workshop, including a group lunch

by Pleun Moons and Beatrice Pittman

Explore how a garden can function as a living workplace, where the relationship between art, spirituality, and natural cycles is brought to life through artistic inquiry, daily care, and self-sustaining practices.
At lunchtime, we’ll enjoy a plant-based meal together.

Pleun Moons draws inspiration from her collaboration with her garden, which centers on the relationship between humans and the earth. Her practice combines physical labor with more contemplative methods, resulting in a variety of forms such as paintings, dinners, and harvest festivals. She works cyclically: what grows is processed and returns as the foundation for new work. In this way, she develops a sustainable, ever-evolving practice.

Beatrice Pittman sees the bringing together of people, objects, and rituals as a form of “weaving.” This gives rise to interactive situations in which people and their surroundings enter into dialogue with one another. Her work is exploratory and experiential, with a focus on physicality and encounter. She draws on ancient crafts and rituals and works as a spaceholder: she creates and maintains a setting in which exchange and shared experience take center stage.

Date:

Saturday, 13 June, 2026

Time:

11—3:30PM

Entree:

Day pass for Saturday: €15
This includes:
– Guided tour by Angelina Valleau
– Workshop (including lunch) by Wilgenvrouwen
– Performance by Plantelectra Orchestra

Language:

Dutch

Group size

20 persons

Location:

Marres city garden
Capucijnenstraat 98, Maastricht
Please check in at the front desk first!

Day pass for Saturday, 13 June, 2026
Julia van de Kar
Ananya Samyt

Performance Plantelectra Orchestra / in roots connected

by Julia van de Kar and Ananya Samyt

Experience an intimate performance in which plants use technology to produce sound, effectively becoming musicians themselves. In a small, immersive setting, a performer moves among the plants and interacts with them, while their rhythms and vibrations become audible to the audience. Get closer to nature, which takes center stage here as a living presence.

Julia van de Kar is a theater artist, performer, and educator who graduated from the Maastricht Academy of Performing Arts. She works intuitively and physically, focusing on voice and movement as universal forms of communication. Her performances exist in the space between the visible and the hidden, creating opportunities for connection and reflection. She also develops participatory workshops and works as a museum educator.

Ananya Samyt is a performer and sound artist who works at the intersection of nature and technology. Using modular synthesizers and biosensors, she translates electrical signals from plants into sound, with the plants acting as active creators. Her work often emerges in collaboration with musicians and invites a new way of listening, where nature and electronics converge.

Date:

Saturday, 13 June, 2026

Tijd:

3:30—5PM

Entrance:

Day pass for Saturday: €15
This includes:
– Guided tour by Angelina Valleau
– Workshop (including lunch) by Wilgenvrouwen
– Performance by Plantelectra Orchestra

Language:

Dutch/English

Group size:

20 personen

Location:

Marres city garden
Capucijnenstraat 98, Maastricht
Please check in at the front desk first!

Day pass for Saturday, 13 June, 2026
Photo: Rob van Hoorn

Hans Engelbrecht 

Throughout the day, ecological gardener Hans van Engelbrecht will be on hand to answer a wide range of questions about the flora and fauna in the Marres garden, which he knows like the back of his hand.

Hans Engelbrecht is the owner of the company De Groene Stap. He skillfully weaves together cultural history, ecology, and the surrounding environment. This results in a connection between gardens and landscaped spaces where nature and natural processes take center stage. In Maastricht, his projects include the Marres city garden, the Sphinxpark, and the Garden of Mercy.

degroenestap.nl

Information

The workshops will take place regardless of the weather, so please dress appropriately!

Questions? Email receptie@marres.org

Partners / thanks to

Marres receives ongoing support from the Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science, the Province of Limburg, and the City of Maastricht.

Marres would also like to thank Hans Engelbrecht, the ecological gardener and designer of the city garden, our volunteer Thuur, and everything that grows and blooms in the garden.

Bewegingsworkshop Amparo González Sola

On Friday, 26 September, from 6—7PM, Amparo González Sola offers an insight into the research Gestures as Portals.

Through simple movement exercises and the activation of the senses, we will explore how gestures can open doors to new ways of perceiving and experiencing.

Participation is easy and accessible: no prior experience in dance or performance is required.

Admission is free between 5–8PM and everyone is welcome!

In the film room, the film Holding Gestures will be shown continuously — where gestures and movement once again take center stage, this time on the screen.

Read more about the performance Gestures as Portals

Didianne Leusink – Performance ‘Verdwalen tussen lichaam en materiaal’ (Lost Between Body and Material)

Image from the performance: The Day I Started to Disappear (2023)

In this 30-minute performance, Leusink wears a large ceramic vase upside down on her shoulders, obscuring her vision and muffling sound. At the same time, a soundscape plays, featuring recordings from workshops — captured while shaping raw materials and found objects — as well as sounds from walks through various landscapes.

The result is an interplay of natural and crafted rhythms and materials. With this, Leusink questions the materiality of living and non-living forms — what we are made of, what we move through, and everything that exists in between. The garden of Marres, with all its human and non-human life forms, becomes a temporary stage where artist, environment, and materials improvise together.

Didianne Leusink (1996, Netherlands) is a visual artist whose work explores the human impact on nature. Her practice often emerges from organic materials and artisanal craftsmanship. She works with raw elements such as crushed stone, plants, and ash, as well as handmade glass djembes, ceramic vases, and painted curtains — objects that have been given a recognizable form.

Date:

Friday 22 August 2025

Time:

6:30PM

Location:

Marres (garden)
Capucijnenstraat 98, Maastricht 

Free entrance
Claim you spot via reserveringen@marres.org


Amparo González Sola – Gestures as Portals

Gestures as Portals is a research and ongoing performance that expands the questions of the project While Taking Shape by choreographer and dancer Amparo González Sola.

The month-long performance takes place during the dismantling of the exhibition Vultures & Fireflies by Mexican artist Alejandro Galván. Visitors encounter the performers in a house where remnants of the exhibition remain visible, alongside traces of its deconstruction and empty spaces.

Amparo González Sola resumes the questions and choreographic methods explored in While Taking Shape,* extending them into a durational, site-responsive format. For Marres, she develops a continuous performance that unfolds over four weeks, inviting visitors to spend as much time as they wish in the space. The work evolves daily, allowing the choreographic materials—and the space itself—to transform gradually through repetition, presence, and interaction.

Gestures are central to González Sola’s practice. She approaches them as portals to memory and connectors between bodies, shaped by context, inherited through generations, and always relational. During her time at Marres, she works with the gestures found in the rooms: those of the performers, the visitors, the workers, and traces from the former exhibition Vultures & Fireflies. These gestures are echoed, held, stretched in the space, repeated, reversed, reshaped: building a vocabulary of movement that slowly accumulates meaning.

The performance emerges from a growing sense of detachment in a world where terrible events are constantly projected onto our retinas through the media—an endless stream of images moving at high speed and stripped of context, seemingly freezing our ability to feel. How close does something need to happen before we feel a connection or a sense of responsibility? By focusing on small gestures, González Sola invites us to reconsider the dynamics of gaze, distance, and proximity as we reflect on what it means to bear witness.



*While Taking Shape is a dance performance created by Amparo Gonzalez Sola, premiered at SPRING Performing Arts Festival 2025.

What to expect

Amparo González Sola & Leando de Souza. Photo: Jesus Serrano Huitron

Dance and movement by performers Amparo González Sola and Leandro de Souza, accompanied by video, light, and sound.

There is no fixed program: each day unfolds differently. González Sola creates a daily score indicating what takes place in each room, at what time, and for how long. This information is shared at the entrance each day. The floor managers and volunteers of Marres explain the daily program and guide you through the different spaces.

Visitors are invited to participate in small experiments that engage body and senses. Sometimes these involve simple actions, such as moving at a certain pace or walking backwards in slow motion. At other times, visitors are asked to hold a posture, gaze, or gesture for a longer time. In this way, an alternation of looking, listening, moving, and slowing down emerges, allowing visitors to become part of an ongoing process of exploration. Simply watching is also welcome!

In the screening room, the film Holding Gestures plays continuously, once again placing gestures and movement at center stage — this time on screen.

Workshops

On Friday evenings and at selected times during the week, González Sola invites you to join her in participatory workshops. Here she shares elements of her choreographic research, encouraging participants to experiment with movement scores and instructions in an open and collective way.

Artist talks

In a series of talks, González Sola discusses her work and process, reflecting on how gestures, movement, and space generate meaning and connection.

Dates & events

Date:

10 Sept—5 Oct 2025
During Gestures as Portals Marres is open from Wednesday — Sunday.

Time:

Continuous performance between 12PM and 5PM.
On Friday evenings, Marres is open until 8PM. During those evenings and at various times throughout the week, González Sola offers workshops where visitors are invited to participate in her research.


Special events

Artist Talk & Performance
12 September 2025
Read more

Workshop
26 September 2025
Read more

Workshop
3 October 2025
Read more

Closing event Gestures as Portals
5 October 2025
Read more

Foto: Rob van Hoorn

Overview Gestures as Portals

Show more
Photo: Rob van Hoorn
Photo: Rob van Hoorn
Photo: Rob van Hoorn
Photo: Rob van Hoorn
Show more
Photo: Rob van Hoorn
Photo: Rob van Hoorn
Photo: Rob van Hoorn
Photo: Jesus Serrano Huitron
Photo: Jesus Serrano Huitron
Photo: Jesus Serrano Huitron
Photo: Jesus Serrano Huitron
Photo: Jesus Serrano Huitron
Photo: Jesus Serrano Huitron

Amparo González Sola

Amparo González Sola (Argentina, 1984) works where dance meets social listening. Her choreographic practice moves between performance and participatory experiments, shaped by feminist activism, migration, and an ongoing inquiry into reciprocity—how bodies, places, and histories respond to one another. She treats gestures as portals: held, slowed, and reshaped to reveal the memories they carry and the connections they invite. Recent works include While Taking Shape, The Conspiracy of Forms, and If Every Rock Is a Hole, presented at SPRING Performing Arts Festival, alongside the long-term project Exploring Reciprocity, which convenes communities across generations and disciplines. From 2025 to 2028 she is an associate artist at Dansateliers.

Credits Gestures as Portals

Concept and direction: Amparo González Sola
Performance and research: Leandro de Souza, Amparo González Sola
Sound: Nahuel Cano
Light: Vinny Jones
Dramaturgical advice: Bek Berger
Video: Jesus Serrano Huitron
Co-production: Dansateliers

Gestures as Portals is part of While Taking Shape, a co-production of Dansateliers, SPRING Performing Arts Festival, Frascati Producties.

Leandro de Souza (Brazil, 1981) is a choreographer and dance maker. His work moves across artistic languages, bringing together knowledge, perspectives, and voices in new ways. He explores unusual approaches to movement, and develops methods and strategies for artistic research and performance-making. Recurring concepts in his practice include escape, opacity, and entanglement, with a strong focus on the shifting possibilities of words, voice, body, and objects. His works include Musa Insistente (Insistent Muse), Eles Fazem Dança Contemporânea (They Make Contemporary Dance), and Sismos e Volts (Seisms and Volts), the latter awarded by the Association of Art Critics of Sâo Paulo.

Vinny Jones (Australia) is a light designer who uses light as a performative medium to shape the relationship between audiences and space. Her work spans experimental performances, large-scale site-specific projects, and collaborations on the stages of national theatres in the Netherlands, the UK, and the Czech Republic. She is drawn to light’s ability to create atmospheres, shift perception, and reveal hidden dimensions within a performance. Recent collaborations include works with Arno Schuitermaker, Lotte van den Berg and the artist duo Andrea Božić and Julia Willms.

Nahuel Cano (Argentina, 1982) is a sound experimenter, theater maker, and performer whose work explores the intersections of ecological collapse, grief, and colonial histories. He weaves together sound, film, storytelling, song, and poetry to create performances that center the transformative power of listening. His recent projects, including Ways to Listen to a River, invite deep connections between audiences, places, and histories. Since 2022, he has been an invited artist at Residenties in Utrecht, engaging with communities and institutions on themes of ecology and Dutch colonial pasts. His work has been supported and presented by local and international platforms such as Het Huis Utrecht, Buitenplaats Doornburgh, Gaudeamus Muziekweek, Hellerau, and WP Zimmer.

Podcast Sensing Art, Training the Body

You can also watch this podcast at YouTube and Vimeo or listen to Apple Podcasts.

Artist talk

On Friday evening, September 12, visitors were able to attend an artist talk with Amparo & Leandro.

6—6:30 PM
Performance by Amparo González Sola and Leandro de Souza


6:30—7PM
Artist talk with Amparo González Sola, Leandro de Souza and Valentijn Byvanck


7PM – Drinks

8PM – Closing

Photo: Rob van Hoorn

Workshops

Photo: Rob van Hoorn

Friday September 26, and 3 October, from 6—7PM, Amparo González Sola offers an insight into the research Gestures as Portals.

Through simple movement exercises and the activation of the senses, we will explore how gestures can open doors to new ways of perceiving and experiencing. Participation is easy and accessible: no prior experience in dance or performance is required.

Admission is free between 5–8PM and everyone is welcome!

In the film room, the film Holding Gestures will be shown continuously — where gestures and movement once again take center stage, this time on the screen.


Closing event Gestures as Portals, last chance!

On Sunday, 5 October, Amparo González Sola, together with Leandro de Souza, will present a special closing performance during the Nederlandse Dansdagen.

Program (free entrance):

12PM
Welcome with coffee & croissants

12:15—12:45PM
Performance by Amparo González Sola and Leandro de Souza

1—2PM
Gathering at the Vrijthof in Maastricht to express support for the Red Line protest in Amsterdam. Everyone who cannot travel to Amsterdam is warmly invited to join us. Together, we will show that solidarity is possible everywhere.

Marres will be closed between 12:50—2PM.

2:30—5PM
Continuation of the performance Gestures as Portals, in which dance, movement, and social engagement come together.

Amparo González Sola in front of Alejandro Galváns work Ramiel. Photo: Rob van Hoorn

Language of the body

The diptych of Gestures as Portals by Amparo González Sola and Terms & Conditions by Ingrid Berger Myhre continues Marres’ long-standing tradition of exploring the language of the body. The Floor is Lava (2019) by artists Sander Breure and Witte van Hulzen, and Museum Motus Mori (2019) by choreographer Katja Heitmann, were also dedicated to this theme.

Press

For press requests, imagery and interview requests, please contact communicatie@marres.org

Download press release (.pdf) Download press images Subscribe to press list

Partners / thanks to

Co-production: Dansateliers

Many thanks to Alejandro Galván and his inspiring work Vultures & Fireflies, Lisa Reinheimer, and the team at Dansateliers, Rita Bifulco and Amador Alina Folini for their contribution in this research, FPK, BAU AIR, Greenhouse, SPRING Performing Arts Festival, Rooms Performance Festival, workspacebrussels, Tanzhaus Zürich, CAMPUS Paulo Cunha e Silva for their support.

Marres receives structural support from the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, the Province of Limburg and the Municipality of Maastricht.