In the exhibition Pure Resilience, photographs of urban nature – dragonflies over a garden pond, pigeons on a balcony, peregrines around Willemsbrug, Nile geese on Spoorsingel, ferns along a quayside – feature in a sweeping panorama of Rotterdam.
Urbanites see (and photograph) urban nature, but not everybody realizes that the city is nature, too. Beyond bricks and concrete, the biodiversity in the built environment is actually bigger than in the surrounding open spaces. This is due to the diversity of urban landscapes, to the warmer urban climate, and to the limitless adaptations – pure resilience – that animals and plants are capable of to utilize the city as a habitat.
In three Pillars of the City – Stone & Street, Food & Water, and Climate & Light – the urban wildlife collection of the Natural History Museum Rotterdam will show which animals and plants have the city as their habitat and what adaptations they have made.
The exhibition dovetails with A PLANET CULTIVATED, the first chapter of the main exhibition of URBAN BY NATURE– in the adjacent Kunsthal Rotterdam.
