, inviting students and researchers to explore ethical foraging, fermentation, and regenerative fieldwork in collaboration with local ecologies.
The series of Seasonal Lab Walks in the Noord-Brabant region focuses on ethical foraging, fermenting, and creating herbariums. These walks emphasize giving back to the environment by supporting organic farming, collaborating with forest rangers, and participating in reforestation projects. Besides we will investigate our bio lab as locally sourced and seasonally dependent. through rewilding our methods and connecting to the soils and organisms outside the sterile space.
This local lab foraging program invites you to walk the common grounds and engage with the local landscapes in a series of field trips between the St. Joost School of Art and Design in Den Bosch and Breda. Together with foragers, mycologists, lichenologists, researchers, artists, and enthusiasts, we will learn about the ecologies of places — assemblages of micro and macro-organisms and elements that co-create the surrounding ecosystems.
Walking in the fields is presented as an extended open-air learning environment where we are encouraged to look, hear, smell, dig, taste, stay with, and learn how to live and work in a caring relationship with nature.
Students and researchers with an Avans account can sign up for all or individual walks. Due to limited availability, we ask for a motivational letter explaining how your practice or research can benefit from this program — and how you can reciprocally join our regenerative efforts in the local lab.
To subscribe, fill out this form (all walks are included in the form)
Roos Konings is a regenerative farmer and forager, who is rooted in Rijsbergen. Roos has always been fascinated by the natural world and plants play an incredibly important role in her life. Since 2016, she has organised foraging walks, taught nature education and garden skills. Last year, she also launched the online Foraging Academy.
Her mission is to offer a solution to modern day challenges, like burn-outs, environmental problems and species loss by showing people an easy and fun way to reconnect with nature. Roos believes that if we respectfully use wild plants, we can protect natural resources and feel more healthy, happy and energized.
As a passionate foraging guide and dedicated plant enthusiast, her goal is to share knowledge and expertise with people who are as crazy as she is about food and plants. She wants to bring back the wild in ourselves and our environment. Moreover, her goal is to bring people together and make them feel happy and reconnected. Her dream is to have a farm where she can grow wild foods, like wild rice and cattails, and where she can work with people with a labour market disadvantage.
For more information, visit Roos Konings
This walk is spread into two days, and it is meant to teach you about local fungi and help us to transfer to seasonally and locally sourced laboratory. The first day starts at 2.00 pm with a walk (or possibly a cycle) to the forest/park/green urban space close to Den Bosch. You will learn about fungi and take some with you. The second day starts in the morning, at 10.00 AM. We will work in the lab, Pim will show his technique of transferring the forest fungi into the Petri dish with the agar medium. Please reserve around 3 hours for the walks (on both days).
Interested in joining the program? Please write you name into this excel sheet and indicate which days you want to join (both ideally, but perhaps you can do only one of these two).
Please note: the walk will be open to maximum of 15 students/researchers.
[Pim/He] is a true fungal enthusiast. A mushroom grower, researcher, and self-taught forager who wants to share the potential that both mushrooms and mycelium hold in tackling current issues. In his walk you’ll learn to understand how fungi support the growth of a spectrum of plants from the land, and the value and methods of growing mushrooms yourself.
For more information, visit Pim van den Noort
23 April 2025, city walk in Breda – This regenerative city walk explored urban nature through the lens of lichens. Together with ecologist and lichenologist Willem Bosma, participants mapped lichen species in the city and reflected on what these indicators reveal about the quality of the living environment. Attention was also given to bird species, trees, and plant diversity — considering how multispecies ecosystems co-exist in urban landscapes. The walk concluded with reflections on how humans can contribute to a more beautiful and healthy shared environment.
7 May 2025, Westerpark pond in Den Bosch – This student-led walk and workshop invited participants to engage with the Westerpark pond through visual cues and sensory-making tools. Social designer Elna Aurand introduced wool-based water sensing devices that question data-driven water surveillance systems. The session included a screening of her in-progress film and offered a space to collectively explore alternative, more-than-human approaches to environmental monitoring.
June 2025 – March 2026
Pictures by Kristina Suryani
‘A bio lab is a place of working with living organisms, brought out of their habitat so we can learn to think outside of the Petri dish. Let’s take care of these teachers!’
At the Avans Centre of Applied Research for Art, Design and Technology (CARADT), Michaela Davidová is lab coordinator at creative research lab Material Incubator and a researcher at the Regenerative Art & Design group.
The Regenerative Art and Design (RAD) research group seeks to contribute to a new generation of regenerative designers and artists who address the pressing need for transitions that support planetary health. By taking whole systems responsibility through collaborative practices, the group aims to create transformative pathways for reimagining design futures grounded in care and ecological integrity.
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