Tag: Event

Opening PPP

Join us on Friday 23 May from 19:00 for the opening of W139’s new exhibition: PPP!

This spring, the Sunflower Soup collective brings PPP to life—a Political Party for Potatoes and other beings. PPP transforms W139 into a site of collective practice: an open workspace where you are welcome to make and share!

While the Potato plays a leading metaphorical role within the party, the P’s are open to many interpretations: PPP could stand for Protorealist Pan-Political Project, Practical Party of Provocation, or Paraprofessional Prototype for Progressive Procreation. This way the PPP functions as a pluriform platform for overlooked or obscured perspectives and aims to be a refuge for those who challenge the current political status quo.

Through a comprehensive workshop programme PPP will gradually expand further over the course of two months. A multitude of collectives, makers, and visitors will collaboratively explore the politics of the potato and contribute to the PPP. As well as being playful and speculative, PPP will become a real physical place of political imagination and connection, proposing alternatives to the ways contemporary politics are shaped. Find out more about the workshop programme soon on our website!

Sunflower Soup was born out of a shared activist engagement and a need to explore what art can mean beyond the confines of the individual.

PPP is supported by Amsterdam Fund for the Arts, Mondriaan Fund and the Cultural Participation Fund.

Visual identity by June Jungeun Yang.

Rainbow Social Music Club

Join us for a drink to celebrate the end of the exhibition together with the Rainbow Soulclub members in an informal gathering followed by a sonic activation by The Social Music Club from 20:00 hrs onwards.

The Social Music Club is a participatory music session for musicians, non-musicians, amateurs, and professionals alike hosted by Aimée Theriot and Koen Nutters. In these gatherings for musical improvisation without dogmas, the emphasis lies on meeting and getting to know each other, while also discussing, putting into practice and stretching the understanding of what exactly music is and can be. Bring an instrument, an object or your own voice if you want to join.

Rainbow Soulclub is an art and solidarity collective founded in 2005 by visual artists Saskia Janssen and George Korsmit. Composed of makers and thinkers coming from different social, economic, and cultural backgrounds, they meet regularly at the collective studio in the drop-in centre of Stichting De Regenboog Groep, an organisation in Amsterdam dedicated to people experiencing homelessness, addiction, poverty, and the challenges that come with undocumented status.

This event is free, but The Social Music Club has a limited capacity so please register here via Eventbrite.

Meet Rainbow Soulclub #2

Join us on Saturday, April 12, to meet Rainbow Soulclub members during an informal afternoon featuring various activities, including live painting at the drawing table with Ebby, Abdi, and David, spiritual education in the tent with Mimosa, an informal group discussion on homelessness and housing in Amsterdam with Malika Amghar, a vegan spring roll workshop with Ting, and the classic Free Advice sessions with various Rainbow Soulclub members—get answers to all your life questions from an unexpected perspective.

Live music: Jacques (guitar and vocals)
Food: Soup by George & Perry (vegan)
Guided tour of the space – Tomas, George, Saskia

Malika Amghar has been working for more than 20 years in the social domain of Amsterdam on practical and creative solutions regarding homelessness and housing at De Regenboog Groep. Her focus is on what is possible and what does work: “I find coming up with solutions fascinating and challenging; my passion lies in removing a root cause in the system. I don’t like mopping with the tap running.

Picture by Maarten Nauw / Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

Meet Rainbow Soulclub #1

Join us on Saturday, March 22, for an informal afternoon with the Rainbow Soulclub, where you can meet members and take part in a variety of activities. Enjoy live painting at the drawing table with Ebby, Abdi, and David, explore spiritual education in the tent with Mimosa, and join an open discussion with human rights lawyer Eva Bezem. Take part in a vegan spring roll workshop with Ting and experience the classic Free Advice sessions with Rainbow Soulclub members, where you can get answers to life’s big and small questions from a fresh perspective.

Eva Bezem has been a human rights lawyer for many years, specializing in migration law. She is particularly committed to advocating for the legal status of Surinamese former Dutch nationals. In 2024, Eva submitted a residence permit application for 100 ‘former Dutch Surinamese’ individuals.

Picture by Maarten Nauw / Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

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. “How Can We Dream If We Don’t Sleep?”
A guided session of storytelling, collective daydreaming, deep listening, and napping facilitated by Sondi.

Our culture requires that people of colour present themselves as extraordinary performers, athletes, or entertainers to exist in the public realm. This culture of constant productivity robs us of our right to rest. This session is a refusal. We gather to reclaim rest as a right, idleness as power, and dreaming as liberation. Rest is not incidental—it is political. Its deprivation is not random—it is systemic.

Inspired by Audre Lorde’s declaration that self-care is an act of “political warfare,” and Tricia Hersey’s Rest is Resistance, we hold space for stillness. In stillness, we heal, rebuild, and dream. Together, we take a collective pause, nurturing both our individual and collective imaginations to resist the forces that deplete us. Come lie down. Drift away. Let your dreams breathe life into infinite futures.

Friday 10 January, 16:00-18:00 — open library hours

Friday 17 January, 16:00-18:00 — open library hours and storytelling and deep listening session by Sondi: How Can We Dream If We Don’t Sleep?
A contemplative session of audio-visual storytelling and collective rest. Through personal narratives and fictional encounters, this experience delves into the themes of Mbombo: Dream Echoes, inviting reflection on the transformative power of dreams to shape infinite futures.

Friday 24 January, 16:00-18:00 — open library hours and deep listening session by Sondi w/ DJ Faustin
How to become orientated when feeling lost? Rhythmic Visions centers the navigation of black identity through sound. Inspired by afro-futurism, its an artistic manifestation of diasporic travels through space and time. A reinterpretation of cultural visions and sounds, towards imagining spaces of belonging

Friday 31 January, 16:00-18:00 — open library hours and deep listening session by Sondi w/ artist S*an  

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.

Faustin is a Dutch/Antillean DJ and artist who uses sound to explore identity and emotion. Known for his genre-blending sets at top (queer) venues like SPIELRAUM, De School, Garage Noord and Club Raum, he draws from his heritage and community to craft immersive experiences. Beyond the booth, Faustin curates events and A/V performances, including cccriojo on Operator Radio, where he reimagines cultural narratives through sound.

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).