The Potato Parliament: A Spud-itorial Debate

Do all potatoes have the same interests or needs? What would potatoes say in a debate? Are all potatoes created equal and privy to the same rights? This workshop explores the existence, language, and connected system of potatoes through playful embodiment and poetic political imagination. 

In the first part of the workshop, participants will be provided with a potato for whom they will form a political party. Each person will receive an information card about their potato and formulate a proposal for a new law through the eyes of their potato. The facilitator, i.e. Head Potato, will help guide each party to come up with a name, slogan, and main debate points. 

In the second half of the workshop, all of the potato parties will come together and debate whether the proposed laws should be passed in Parliament or not. All members will vote on passing or rejecting the bill. 

The debate session will be recorded and presented during the remaining days of the PPP workshop programme.

The Potato Parliament: A Spud-itorial Debate with Jody Aikman
Saturday 31 May, 12:00 – 15:30
Wednesday 18 June, 12:00 – 15:30

Jody Aikman is a poet and performer exploring the intersection where artist, audience and message meet. She researches the silences in language by questing meaning, ambiguity, and implication through her writing. Her performances are created to blur the line between audience and artist, investigating the relationship between herself, the other and the world. 

Reserve your spot on the Eventbrite-page of the event.
Participation is free, but donations are very welcome.

PotatoPress

On 29 May, PotatoPress opens the doors of its editorial room to all curious, wandering, and ambitious potato journalists to contribute to the PPPotato newspaper! Come peel a potato to reveal its hidden layers, dig deep in the earth for its roots, expose its versatility, become the paparazzi of potatoes, bring out the latest (fake) news, or contribute to the entertainment section. 

In the editorial room, we’ll explore the politics of the potato together. Using different perspectives, personal knowledge, field research, and (reliable) sources, we’ll reflect on the role of the potato in our society, the global economy, our common thinking, different ideologies and strong opinions. What does the potato have to tell us? How can the potato nurture our ideas about the politics of being together and interacting with each other? We’ll also dive deep into our primal Dutch frying culture and the snackbar as a meeting place. What is the role of the snackbar in today’s times? 

The newspaper will be published and distributed in the neighbourhood of P139.

Participants can drop in and join any time. You can sign up using the Eventbrite link.

Mul-thee-fuhngk-shuh-nl is a collective that creates dynamic installations with a crossover between workshops, public space installations, and happenings through interactions with others. Their projects share a common focus on engaging with the environment and fostering exchanges with a diverse audience, generating new imaginaries around the contexts the projects take place in.

P(r)otato Propaganda Production workshop

Make Playful P(r)otato Propaganda with Sunflower Soup! During this workshop, participants will engage in experimental ways of imagining politics, while creating new PPP slogans, pamphlets and monumental banners together. Using PPP’s very own Pulp-font stamps, and an amazing collection of fabrics, we will produce PPP propaganda that is poetic, colourful, and polyphonic. Let’s Peel the Power! And practise the politics of poetic potato promotion.

The workshop is open to all ages (grown up and baby potatoes) and no prior skills are required to take part. The banners produced in the first workshop will become part of the PPP and will be displayed in the space. 

P(r)otato Propaganda Production workshop with Sunflower Soup

Sunday May 25, 15:00 – 18:00
Saturday June 14, 14:00 – 17:00

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. The collective is driven by a number of questions:can a shared way of working contribute to a less detached experience of art? How do people relate to each other and to the more-than-human world? How do we reconcile the importance of activism with a poetic visual language that allows for humour, paradox and ambiguity?

Reserve your spot on the Eventbrite-page of the event.
Participation is free, but donations are very welcome.

Potato Growing Workshop

13:00 hrs at W139 or 14:00 hrs at the 4Siblings field.

Polyculture, in opposition to monoculture, is a system of growing plants that are beneficial to each other and create a regenerative effect on the soil. We think of polyculture as a symbol of political practices of living together in community. In this workshop we will collectively learn about polyculture and the life cycle of plants—from seed to sowing, to growth, and harvest. On 13 May we will sow potatoes and think about other plants and their existence from seed to harvest, throughout the seasons. In order to facilitate this thought process on the lifecycle of plants we will engage in an embodied personification exercise with all the elements that contribute to the life of our small garden. The workshop will be outdoors, so please wear warm clothes, closed shoes and bring a bottle of water. No experience with farming or performance is needed.

Please note: if you join the workshop at 13:00 at W139, you will be participating in an approximately 30 minutes bike procession to the 4Siblings field. Please bring your bike and a bag or carrier to transport material.

A follow up workshop will be dedicated to harvesting the results. 

Date and time are still to be confirmed (depending on when the potatoes are ready to harvest.)

4Siblings is an artist collective and a community garden focusing on creating ecofeminist and queer connections to food and land. They focus on land-based art and research, collectively creating gardens as artistic platforms. These outdoor spaces allow artists and makers to develop their practice from the perspective of community and ecology. 

Reserve your spot on the Eventbrite page of the event.
Participation is free, but donations are very welcome.

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 role within the party, the P’s are open to many interpretations: PPP could stand for Protorealist Pan-Political ProjectPractical Party of Provocation, or Pansexual Potato Phantasy. 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