Netelland, created by composer Eva Beunk and installation artist Adrian Gutzelnig in collaboration with the Gaudeamus Festival and Stichting Op Wacht, is an immersive, site-specific performance set in the speculative year 2169. Staged at Fort Maarsseveen in Maarssen near Utrecht, which in the performance’s narrative has become an isolated island due to climate change and rising waters, the piece conveys ecological themes through multisensory exploration and participatory worldbuilding.
Rather than pursuing a didactic approach to explain global ecological collapse, Netelland presents a pragmatic, solarpunk-leaning future where humans have adapted to radically changed water levels. It investigates how human culture, rituals, and music may evolve in response to ecological rupture, framing resilience as an ongoing, communal practice rather than a property of technological advancement or top-down planning.
The titular stinging nettle (brandnetel) serves as a core ecological frame of the performance. Often dismissed as a stubborn, irritating weed, the nettle in the fictional 2169 scenario is elevated to become a versatile ally, providing sustenance (nettle tea and food), medicine, raw craft material, and ecological repair. This deliberate shift or re-framing prompts audiences to reconsider reciprocal relationships with non-human life, highlighting how survival demands valuing resilient species rather than attempting to dominate nature.
Fort Maarsseveen was constructed at around 1880 as a military defense installation within the New Dutch Waterline, designed to manipulate water levels for national defense purposes. Netelland subverts this militarized hydro-engineering; the moat and overgrown fort are re-imagined as an ecological shelter and shared commons, replacing the historical idea of border defense with ecological shelter and communal repurposing.
Formally, Netelland combines elements of participatory and immersive theater with design conventions like environmental storytelling and experiential qualities from games, specifically Live Action Role-Playing (LARP). For example, audience entry is restricted to a hand-pulled ferry at the back of the fort. Physically crossing the moat serves as crossing the literal threshold into the game space (which Johan Huizinga described as entering a “magic circle”), marking the boundary where players suspend everyday reality to enter the fictional world of 2169. Moreover, visitors do not sit in a traditional auditorium but instead explore a persistent open environment during a curated 3-hour stay. Narrative backstory, i.e. what transpired between 2025 and 2169, is not delivered via linear exposition, but scattered throughout the physical space, e.g. as acoustic messages or environmental props, for participants to discover organically, using principles like epistolary storytelling and embedded narrative (Henry Jenkins) employed in many (mostly video) games.
Visitors are expected to transition from passive spectators to active players. They receive tasks/quests like crafting drumsticks, working clay, learning futuristic songs, and taking on practical roles in communal tasks, thereby enacting the daily labor and rituals of the fictional post-apocalyptic colony. Apart from individual tasks, collaborative ‘minigames’ and physical coordination challenges such as forming a human ‘water chain’ or acting as discrete notes in an interactive ‘melodic clock’ function as embodied experiences created through procedural rhetoric. The gameplay rules inherently enforce cooperationCooperation This is a dummy entry about cooperation., demonstrating that community, specifically in a (hopeful) climate dystopia, cannot thrive on isolated individual actions.