Studio Hovinga, rooted in curiosity, Founded by Johannes-Harm Hovinga
Studio Hovinga aims to blur boundaries, to invite to taste the world differently: not as consumers, but as participants in a system of perpetual transformation.
The inspiration, a belief that every ingredient if it’s food, music or an anecdote carries the memory of its soil, its wind, its precise geography. It’s the dialogue with the language of perception itself, light, reflection, temporality, tools that awaken our awareness of how we see, feel, and inhabit the world surrounding us.
A sensorial ecosystem, where art, food, landscaping, ecology and climate consciousness merge.
(Since childhood, I have been fascinated by how landscapes tell stories. They hold memory; they reveal both beauty and struggle. One of the earliest and most formative experiences of my life was growing up near Robert Smithson’s Broken Circle – Spiral Hill in Emmen. As a child this land art work was a playground, spiral hill was the castle hill to conquer. Later when growing older the work learned me to look with different eyes to the landscapes surrounding us, and how art can shape and reveal our relationship with the land. The Dutch landscape is a human-made one, a patchwork of control and cultivation a landscape where nature and human intervention are locked in an ongoing negotiation.
Through my work, I try to expose this tension to restore a sense of connection, humility, and care for the living world we too often take for granted.
For me, art, landscaping, and food are inseparable. They are all ways of engaging with the world, of transforming the everyday into something meaningful. Art, especially, has the power to make the invisible visible, to record what should not be forgotten, to speak up for those who cannot, and to build awareness for the challenges we face, from climate change and biodiversity loss to social and human rights issues.)
Johannes-Harm Hovinga
Studio Hovinga exists to explore these intersections, where beauty meets responsibility, where wildness meets design, where flavours rediscover their origins, and where imperfection becomes part of the story rather than something to hide. In my world, a crooked line can be truer than a perfect circle, and a small gesture can speak louder than a grand statement.
What we strive for is honesty, to create ideas, projects, and spaces if it’s in art or otherwise, that help us see differently and feel more deeply, that reconnect us with what truly matters as humanity faces demanding issues such as a changing climate, environmental challenges and social injustice
Studio Hovinga is not simply a fixed location on a map. It is a nomadic studio, guided by collaborations and encounters, not fixed to geography, but to curiosity.
Looking toward the future not as something distant, but as something that is shaped in every gesture, every decision, every act of attention in the present. We are in a time where environmental limits are being tested, social structures are under pressure, and many people feel disconnected from the systems that sustain them.
Through art, landscapes, food, and collective experiences, the studio seeks to create small but meaningful shifts in how people perceive their relationship with the world. It imagines future spaces where nature is not treated as a resource, but as a collaborator. Where public space is not only functional, but also a place for reflection and shared responsibility. Where food is not only consumed, but understood as part of an ecological and cultural cycle. Where communities are not passive audiences, but co-authors of their own environments.
Rather than offering fixed solutions, Studio Hovinga works with open questions. It creates situations where new ways of thinking and living can be rehearsed at human scale, like interruptions in everyday life. In these moments, future possibilities become tangible, touchable, and collectively imaginable.
We want to contribute to a culture of awareness:
a culture that values slowness over speed, connection over extraction, and care over control. A culture where responsibility is not a burden, but a shared creative act, evolving, and alive. Shaped through collaboration with people, with landscapes, and with the more-than-human world..
When we pay attention everything speaks.