Event – W139

Cosmic Entanglements

Since March 2024, Buro Stedelijk has hosted the monthly speculative fiction reading group Goddess Change, initiated by artists Anna Hoetjes and Müge Yılmaz, who are also the initiators of Taking Root Among the Stars. As an extension of the exhibition at W139, Buro Stedelijk will host a film screening evening that brings together films that expand on the quantum realm—using it as a framework to propose different social realities and relationships to time, alternative futures, and communal relations to nature.

The program opens with Larissa Sansour’s The Nation Estate, a 9-minute sci-fi short film and a photo series offering a clinically dystopian, yet humorous approach to the deadlock in the Middle East. With its glossy mixture of computer generated imagery, live actors and an arabesque electronica soundtrack, the Nation Estate film explores a vertical solution to Palestinian statehood. Palestinians have their state in the form of a single skyscraper: the Nation Estate. One colossal high-rise houses the entire Palestinian population – now finally living the high life.

Tres Lunas más Abajo [Three Moons Below] by Patricia Dominguez will have its Netherlands premier as part of this film program. Tres Lunas más Abajo is a spi-fi (spiritual fiction) cinematic exploration that crosses the spiritual and quantum realms. In this fictional universe, CERN’s physics experiments and the astronomical observatories in the Atacama Desert converge with ancient petroglyphs, creating portals that transport the protagonist and her robotic bird companion. Together, they embark on a journey through otherworldly realities, consulting with mystical beings and acquiring celestial antennas and particle detectors.

Domínguez’s personal, futuristic, and unearthly imagery is informed by her extensive research, spanning experimental sites to studies in ethnobotany and South American spiritual practices in plant healing. At the heart of their quest lies a prayer to identify and care for one’s entangled particle. The protagonist contemplates the nature of her entanglement, wondering if it could be with a machine, a wounded bird, or even a star in the distant Andromeda galaxy. The film explores the desire to feel, experience, and learn through these entanglements, offering a world vision in which everything is intertwined in a cosmic knot. By merging ancestral knowledge and contemporary science, the film expands our understanding of the universe beyond the tangible and visible. It advocates for a need to form connections between all living things, machines, and other entities, to develop more sustainable and supportive ways of existing.

The second film in the program is a work from Black Quantum Futurism that documents the Time Zone Protocols (TZP) Surveyors Group and brings together a summary of themes and explorations that took place. Leading up to the Prime Meridian Unconference, Black Quantum Futurism convened the TZP Surveyors Discussion Group–21 individuals who met several times to examine and discuss TZP research materials, including an archive of readings, images, sounds, and videos on time zones, time, temporality, prime meridian, temporal oppression as experienced by Black communities, and social, political, and cultural concepts of time and temporality. The discussion centered on new ways of understanding our relationships to space-time, utilizing specific social, geographical, and cultural frameworks that depart from colonial linearity and shift the standards and protocols of time that leave Black people locked out of the past and future, and stuck in a narrow temporal present.

Location: Buro Stedelijk — Entrance via Paulus Potterstraat 13
Free entrance with ticket — reserve your ticket here

Bios

Larissa Sansour is a Palestinian artist and director. Central to her work is the tug and pull between fiction and reality. In her recent works, she uses science fiction to address social and political issues. Working mainly with film, Sansour also produces installations, photos and sculptures. Sansour lives and works in London.

Patricia Domínguez, born in 1984, Santiago, Chile, is an artist, organic technologist, and Earth defender based in Puchuncaví, Chile. Assembling experimental research on ethnobotany, extractivism and healing practices, her work focuses on tracing digital and spiritual relationships between living species in an increasingly corporate cosmos. She proposes a poetic vision of contemporary life as deeply connected to the earth. She is also the founder of Studio Vegetalista, an experimental platform for ethnobotanical research.

Black Quantum Futurism is an interdisciplinary creative practice, formed in 2014 by Camae Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips, weaving quantum physics, Afrofuturism, and Afrodiasporic concepts of time, space, ritual, and sound to create practical ways to escape negative temporal loops, oppression vortexes, and the digital matrix. By mobilising the past, local histories, and memories, they develop new visions of the future.

Between the Shadow and the Sun

The winter solstice marks the longest night of the year in the Northern hemisphere. This moment, when the sun seems to stand still for a moment, has marked an important transition in our planet’s cycle since the earliest times. On this day we embrace scarcity, abundance, and renewal in this specific cusp in time. During this event we will gather together to celebrate the winter solstice and think about how we can collectively prepare for times of scarcity. Through conversations, cooking and eating together, and watching a film, we will explore how our own human cycles are inextricably tied to the cycles of the seasons and agriculture.

Mariken Heitman, renowned Dutch novelist, educator, and vegetable farmer, will be joining us as a guest. Her work, both in farming and in writing, reflects on how the cultivation of crops can be seen as one of the most intimate relationships between human bodies and their surroundings. In her work she’s also increasingly critical about the artificial division of human and nature. While we prepare food and cook together, we will have a conversation with Mariken to reflect on cycles of growing, harvesting, preserving, celebrating, and resting—both of humans and of the land. We’ll also explore how in literature and in art speculation can be used as a tool to build words and carve out space for new perspectives.

The practices of stocking provisions and creating energy reserves for times of scarcity also carry celebration within them. Throughout the evening, artist and chef Maria Khatchadourian will guide us to collectively prepare food and cook together, reflecting on the tensions between abundance and scarcity that are present during the winter solstice period. Bringing together winter plants and roots, both foraged and cultivated, our collective meal will reflect on the past and future (embodied knowledge) and notions of sustenance in relation to scarcity.

The evening will finish with a screening of Saul Williams’ film Neptune Frost—a transdimensional sci-fi musical set in past-, future- and present-day Rwanda, in the afterlife of the nation’s civil war. An adventure into anti-narrative as Black diasporic treatise, Neptune Frost tells of a generation of dreamers escaping the psycho-social wreckage of colonization, genocide, and the residual brutalities of global extractive industries.

Mariken Heitman studied biology in Utrecht, and currently writes and works as a gardener and teacher of vegetable cultivation. She has published short stories on de Fusie, De Optimist, Papieren Helden, nY, and extra extra magazine. Articles and essays by her have appeared in De Volkskrant, De Standaard and NRC, among others. In 2019, her debut novel De Wateraap was published by Atlas Contact. It was nominated for the Bronzen Uil, the Anton Wachterprijs and was on the longlist for the Jan Wolkersprijs. Her second novel Wormmaan was published in August 2021. Her latest novel De Mierenkaravaan was published in August 2024.

Maria Khatchadourian’s artistic practice takes shape at the intersection of food and art, where inherited recipes, food imaginaries, and communal gestures of eating and cooking together become a gathering ground to unearth notions of exile and loss. Through durational performances, installations, and collaborative dinners she wants to shed light on the politics of care and conflict, of kinship and hardship that shape the landscapes we inhabit.

Get your tickets in our Eventbrite page!

Full programme (Cooking, dinner and screening):
Regular ticket – €12,50
Student ticket – €10,00

Only film screening (from 20:00):
Student discount – €4
Regular ticket – €5

Slow Wanderings

How can we collectively reclaim space to slow down and imagine new just worlds together? Join us every Friday afternoon in January, when artists Müge Yilmaz and Sondi will activate the exhibition space through their works.

Müge will host open hours for The Adventures of Umay Ixa Kayakızı—a feminist science fiction library. She has spent years collecting more than 250 books by female, trans, and non-binary writers (sometimes under male pseudonyms) written in a speculative framework about possible future worlds. During these hours you can consult with Müge for book recommendations tailored to your interests and borrow a book from the library in consultation with the artist or you can simply treat these hours as a read-in to come and read books in the space.

Parallel to the open library hours, Sondi will activate her expansive video game installation through a series of listening sessions and collective moments of rest. Following in the tradition of visionary fiction, Sondi’s work offers a way to practise the future; one that reclaims stolen imaginations, normalises slow wanderings, and encourages a probing of our dream spaces as sites of possibility. For the listening sessions, Sondi will be inviting sound artists to create a sonic space for collective refuge.

10 January — 16:00-18:00
17 January — 16:00-18:00
24 January — 16:00-18:00
31 January — 16:00-18:00

Tickets: visitors can drop in and join with a regular ticket to the exhibition.

Sondi is a new media artist from Germany, born in Cameroon and based in the Netherlands. Her work is deeply rooted in her identity as a person of the diaspora and acts as a conduit to unravel the intricate and intimate layers of identity, belonging, ownership, and heritage. Her artistic process centres around the concept of worldbuilding, creating virtual environments where memory, ancestry, and imagination enter into being. In these virtual dreamscapes, she examines new modes of being, using the power of imagination as an instrument of liberation.

Müge Yılmaz examines in her work the paradoxes around the concept of protection with a focus on community, survival and belief (faith). Through performances, photographs, and installations she creates immersive environments inspired by feminist science-fiction. Following the concept of three ecologies for observing the mental (subjective), societal, and environmental developments in a parallel method, she uses these mediums as tools for envisioning potential futures.

FLUSH #4: Bread Buffet

Come to Bread Buffet at FLUSH #4, eat some cucumber sarnies, and read with us as we think through and around the site of work, precarity and enjoyment.

Within affective labour economies and the history of service and hospitality, we can see a broader pattern of systemic inequality shaped by colonialism, capitalism, and neoliberal governance. These frameworks often perpetuate exploitation whilst cloaked under the guise of benevolence, setting up defined roles of “host” and “guest”.

Bread Buffet is an offering from artists Sophie Soobramanien and Shreya de Souza. It is an ongoing methodology which takes various models according to a theme. Through workshops, zines, reading groups and experimental performances, they collage and interweave theory, art, fiction, contemporary events and visual material. Trying to find ways to contextualize and present swathes of research and information that bypass the potential barriers of academia. We are motivated to co-create these shifting shapes with a public/audience, in dispersing and digesting various knowledges, connecting thought and form in the process. Included in the buffets is a source list of all the extracts, citation being a vital part of the process.

Please RSVP to breadbuffetservice@gmail.com if you would like to come due to limited space in the toilet.

Cucumber sandwiches will be vegan, let us know in your RSVP if you are gluten free.

FLUSH #4: La Toilette

Through the electromagnetic waves of the phone, Taylor tells me that they had heard (or read?) Karen Rose say: “The body is your spiritual antenna.” It’s been a while since I’ve thought about antennas. I google them and find: “How to maintain and protect your antenna from the ravages of time and weather?”

The motif of “la toilette” is a recurring theme in art history, representing moments of personal care such as dressing, combing one’s hair, applying makeup, or washing. Its universality spans different eras and cultures, reflecting notions of privacy and community, everyday challenges, aesthetic concerns, and transcendent ideals. FlUSH 4 invites us, in the stench of the most ineluctable aspect of our human condition, to some intimate moments of pictorial corporeality with Cosima zu Knyphausen.

FLUSH: a sudden rush of intense emotion is a flourishing collaboration between Espacio Estamos Bien and W139, located in the toilets of W139. FLUSH operates as a flexible form of organizing and creating, enabling various types of collaboration. FLUSH aims to foster inter-local relationships, viewing Amsterdam as a hub for facilitating diverse interactions and building connections that bridge distances. Joyful, friendly and decentralized connections extend beyond the Amsterdam art scene.

Text by Taylor Le Melle
Production by Julia Nowicka and Clara Rojas
Text design by Josefina Contin
Poster by Cosima zu Knyphausen
With publications of Lesbianas Concentradas

I Wish I Had a Dark Sea

Artist Brittany Nelson has spent several years researching an archive of letters written between science-fiction writer James Tiptree Jr., who was really a woman named Alice Sheldon, and author Ursula K. Le Guin. Sheldon used a male pen name to get published in the 1970s, and to freely write about her closeted sexuality and desires using alien encounters as metaphors. Tiptree, while in hiding, wrote flirtatious letters to Le Guin, with more than 500 pieces of correspondence exchanged between the two authors in the 1970s before Tiptree was outed as Alice Sheldon.

In this public talk, Brittany will be in conversation with Julie Phillips, who is currently working on a biography of Ursula K. Le Guin. The two will be in conversation about the correspondence between Le Guin and Tiptree. Brittany Nelson will be joining online. The talk will be moderated by Fiep van Bodegom.

The title of this event is derived from a letter written from Tiptree to Le Guin, which is also part of Brittany’s work in the exhibition, which simply states “I Wish I Had a Dark Sea,”—alluding to Tiptree’s ongoing depression and referencing an Emily Dickinson poem as well as Le Guin’s story The New Atlantis.

Tickets: €7,50
Student price: €5,00

Buy your ticket on the Eventbrite-page of the event.

Julie Phillips is an an American biographer and book critic and the author of James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, which received several honours including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Hugo and Locus Awards, and the Washington State Book Award. Julie is currently working on a biography of Ursula K. Le Guin.

Brittany Nelson explores 19th-century photographic chemistry techniques and science fiction to address themes of loneliness, isolation, and distance within the queer community and its parallels with space exploration.

Fiep van Bodegom is a writer, critic and translator. She is the editor of Extra Extra Magazine and teaches at the Creative Writing department at ArtEZ, University of the Arts. She has published regularly about literature in, amongst others, De Gids, De Groene Amsterdammer, NRC, and De Nederlandse Boekengids. She wrote the foreword for the first Dutch translation of Octavia E. Butler’s novel Kindred (Verbonden, 2022).

Despite Scarcity

Plants often live quite unnoticed around us, especially in the winter months. How can we open up more to plants? In this winter foraging workshop, cook and nature guide Rens Spanjaard will take us into the lives of plants through a number of observation exercises to make contact with plants and their environments—seeing, smelling, tasting, and experiencing the plants ourselves. Everyone will discover different qualities of plants in this process, making the collective walk a rich and instructive way to share knowledge. We’ll be discovering, tasting, and smelling the plants to engage with the hidden lives of plants around us, especially in urban environments and cities. Both edible and medicinal plants will be explored, in an effort to think together about how to sustain ourselves, and our communities, in the face of scarcity.

This walk is part of the community programme for Taking Root Among the Stars, where we want to make visible the possibilities of making connections with speculative literature beyond imagination and theory. By gathering to learn new skills and be in community with one another, we reinforce that the speculative is grounded in gaining tools for the future.

The walk will begin at the pond in Westerpark, near the big oak tree, where we will start our experience with a warm acorn drink together. Find the starting location here.

Capacity: 10 people maximum
Tickets: €17,50
Student price: €15,00

Buy your ticket on the Eventbrite-page of the event.

* You don’t need to bring anything with you for the workshop. Just be sure to check the weather beforehand and dress appropriately for the weather conditions and the two-hour walk through the park.

** We offer community tickets for visitors who do not have the financial means to visit W139’s exhibitions or context programming. If you want to join the foraging walk but do not have the means, please contact us at info@w139.nl.

Rens Spanjaard is a cook and a nature guide. Rens studies herbal medicine and was the initiator of the food forest in Almere and Amsterdam.

Love, Rob

Join us in commemorating and celebrating the work of Rob Schröder, visionary documentary filmmaker and graphic designer, co-initiator of the activist design collective Wild Plakken, co-founder the Sandberg Instituut, and tutor at Sandberg Design, Shadow Channel and Resolution.

Rob supported and inspired many students bringing together the worlds of filmmaking and design. As former students of Rob we invite you to an informal evening of coming together, watching and discussing two of Rob’s films and remembering Rob, as the caring and supportive tutor he has been.

15.30 Doors open
15.45 Azawad, The Art of Creating a State, Gabrielle Provaas & Rob Schröder, 2015
17.00 Ouwe Hoeren / Meet the Fokkens, Gabrielle Provaas & Rob Schröder, 2011
18.00 Informal after talk with drinks
18.30 Closing

The event will be for free. Donations are welcome. All proceeds will go to Syrian Eyes عيون سورية who support Syrian and Palestinian communities with food, essential products and temporary housing in BEIRUT, TRIPOLI and BEKAA. You can donate here.

Rsvp: design@sandberg.nl

Organised by the Sandberg Instituut in collaboration with W139 and alumni Emirhan Akin, Anja Groten and Juliette Lizotte.

Azawad, The Art of Creating a State, Gabrielle Provaas & Rob Schröder, 2015

Azawad: The Art of Creating a State offers a unique insight into the everyday struggle of the Kel Tamasheq (Tuareg), Arab, Fula, and Songhai peoples that have joined the liberation movement. Together with artist Jonas Staal and researcher Younes Bouadi, the directors interviewed the movement’s provisional government, commanders, strategists, historians, and artists, who explain their endeavors in the “art of creating a state”—a state that, up until today, has not been recognized by any other state in the world.

Ouwe Hoeren / Meet the Fokkens, Gabrielle Provaas & Rob Schröder, 2011

“In the old days, the local copper would tap on the window if a girl was showing too much ankle, now the girls deal coke from their cubicles.” Louise and Martine Fokkens are identical twins. For over 40 years they were working as prostitutes. They freed themselves from the control of their pimps, ran their own brothel, and set up the first informal trade union for prostitutes. They are familiar faces in Amsterdam’s Red Light District, but soon they will bid their farewells.

Meet the Fokkens is a portrait of these remarkable women, as well as a history of the Red Light District over the past fifty years.

FLUSH #3: Regresar al Mundo

It is almost one year since the ongoing genocide in Palestine; it has been 75 years since it all started. In spite of it all, we want to gather; in spite of it all, we want to be together; in spite of it all, we invite you to be here with us.

For this occasion, FLUSH will be taken over by the Colombian artist AUSENCIA, who will present his project Regresar al mundo. In this project, he touches upon the question of displacement through the story of a group of birds forced to move. AUSENCIA will show both text and textile works. During the days of the show, we will sell prints of AUSENCIA made in collaboration with Not Shit Print, raising money for different initiatives that support people in Palestine.

Alejandro Moreno Marin (@ausencia.nada) has published books, made clothes, designed objects and painted streets. What interests him most is discovering the narrative possibilities of the image and the exploration of media and materials. Currently, he creates works from textile materials and uses techniques such as embroidery, weaving and patchwork. His work is nourished by his sensitive experience, by seeking the extraordinary in everyday life, by religious iconography, material culture and popular graphic production.

“¡Aves rebeldes! Hermanas, compañeras,
Cantamos por la huelga
Que sea ahora mismo o no será nunca más
Todas juntas, aves de ciudad
palomas, torcazas, pericos
A desplegar alas y cantos”

“Rebel birds! Sisters, comrades,
We sing for the strike
Let it be right now or it will never be again
All together, city birds
Pigeons, wood pigeons, parakeets
To spread wings and songs”

Culturele Wallen Route

Do you want to experience the cultural gems of De Wallen in a day? On Saturday 7 September cultural institutions in the historic city centre will open their doors for free to everyone in Amsterdam. From 11:00 till 16:00 hrs, you are welcome at the participating organisations for a tour, performance, exhibition, workshop, concert, or lecture. Join the Culturele Wallen Route and (re)discover the creative heart of the city!

On presentation of the programme booklet of the Cultural Wallen Route, entry to W139 is free of charge. The programme booklets are available at the starting point of the Cultural Wallen Route, Waag Futurelab, the entrance of the Oude Kerk, and other locations.

From Waag Futurelab as starting point, the route will lead you to the other partners of Culturele Wallen: Huis De Pinto, Museum Ons’ Lieve Heer Op Solder, Oude Kerk, Frascati, Vlaams Cultuurhuis de Brakke Grond, Museum Rembrandthuis, and W139, where you can visit the exhibition Remarkable Meetings with Disgusting Men.

About Culturele Wallen

The Culturele Wallen Route on Saturday 7 September marks the launch of Culturele Wallen, a new collective that unites the cultural gems of Amsterdam’s historic city heart. Through enhanced visibility, collaborative energy, and inventive partnerships, the neighbourhood regains its creative identity and artistic soul. Once again, locals are drawn to this vibrant and creative part of the city.

You can find more information on the website of Culturele Wallen.