Forever Summer

As De Onkruidenier, the duo Jonmar van Vlijmen (1980, Doetinchem) and Ronald Boer (1981, Giessenburg) explores the relationship between humanity and nature in a semi-scientific and artistic practice. The project Forever Summer, which takes part in “Collection as Cosmos,” is centered around tomatoes. Forever Summer, is a participatory artwork that has previously been shown at the Van Abbemuseum. In March, around thirty households in Brabant and beyond will receive seeds of eight different tomato varieties, inviting home growers to form a tomato community and tend to an artwork that cannot be collected or preserved in the traditional sense.

The title Forever Summer, points to how climate-controlled greenhouses have made fresh tomatoes available year-round, creating the feeling of a permanent, placeless summer. Tomatoes have been grown this way so long that many cultivated varieties can no longer survive in the wild. While they once came in an extraordinary range of shapes and colors, supermarkets sell mostly greenhouse varieties.

There is a strange parallel between greenhouses and the museum’s storage room, which hold similar conditions of temperature and humidity, and follow a similar logic of preservation: both controlled environments are designed to halt change. Forever Summer asks what it means to preserve a living thing by removing it from life. The artwork can only exist outside the museum walls, in kitchens and gardens, and growers are invited to cultivate tomatoes of wildly different colors, from blue to purple to yellow, tracing the interaction between food diversity and climate.

Would you like to cultivate tomatoes for Forever Summer? You can sign up here and more information will follow via e-mail. The tomato seeds can be picked up between 19 and 21 March, in the entrance hall of the museum. Along with the seeds, you will also receive a logbook and instructions on how to best care for the tomatoes during their initial growth phase. Our staff will also be caring for tomato plants at various locations throughout the museum. During the project, you can participate in meetings of the tomato community. At the end of the growing cycle (in late August or early September), the harvest will be celebrated with an exhibition about both the harvest and the observations and reflections surrounding the growing process.

The 2026 edition will be part of the new collection presentation Collection as Cosmos, which reflects on hidden relationships between people and also with their environment. The project will start over again each year of the collection presentation, which lasts 4 years.