Sonsbeek 2026’s title Ik hoef geen tuin, ik deel een park (I don’t need a backyard, I share a park) originates from the Arnhem-based collective Loesje—one of the participating artists. By adopting this slogan from Loesje’s posters, Sonsbeek 2026 places the park at its center, emphasizing a spirit of collective experience, where meaning is shaped together rather than defined from one perspective.
Just as the park is not neutral, memory is not neutral either. Each is a creation of our infrastructures, be they political or social or cultural, determining what is remembered and what is left out. And so the park, through this edition, becomes the platform where this becomes undone and where the mechanisms of memory are exposed and reengineered. As such, memory is approached as a living action—unstable, incomplete, and continuously reworked. The artists in Sonsbeek 2026 are connected by a conviction that memory is produced through speaking and listening, assembling and disassembling, as the lived practice of coexistence that is anything but passive. Released into the common space of this park, where memory becomes the material through which we orient ourselves, we might contest inherited narratives and make the conditions for a shared future.
