“To create is to resist”, the more so when we do it together. On the last day of Spooktember, come in to make your own buttons or screenprint your clothes, while we’re joined by other autonomous and anarchist book and zine crafters to provide a mini book and zine fair!
Spookstad is a publishing collective that emerged from the squatting movement in Amsterdam. They make books in close collaboration with various activist collectives.
The student encampments of 2024 marked a first global wave of mass mobilizations in support of Palestine and against Western complicity. On the basis of the Spookstad-published book about the student uprising in Amsterdam, we explore how art, writing and documentaries contribute to the Palestine solidarity movement, and how we can take it further.
Programme Saturday 20 September
14:30 — Mapping solidarity: interactive session hosted by Saja Amro. What is the role of art, cultural work, academia, and activism in the West, particularly in the Netherlands, in times of genocide? And how to strengthen our networks to avoid fragmentation and consolidate our strategies towards effective aims?
We will create a map together to serve as an active tool for documentation and strategy building. This session is a continuation of the Mapping Solidarity Project, in collaboration with platform BK. Please register by sending an email to hello@spookstad.boo.
16:00 — Film screening “Class outside”: a collective video diary capturing everyday moments of resistance, solidarity, and conflict, following the student encampments in Amsterdam during May 2024 and the various subsequent actions. By Aylin Kuryel, Fırat Yücel & Deniz Buga.
17:00 — Performance of “Dear, Comrade”, by Lila Swindles and Olga Tsyganova. A play about the student occupations, resistance, collectivity, and the attempt to not lose hope.
Program will also be part of Amsterdam Bangs Festival.
Spookstad is a publishing collective that emerged from the squatting movement in Amsterdam. They make books in close collaboration with various activist collectives.
A Nightmare on Warmoes Street is a triple bill performance night with artists Mette Sterre, Diane Mahín and G at W139. Presented inside the immersive group exhibition Temper Tantrum Bonehouse, these three solo performances explore the beyond-human body and its limitless potential.
G-string Theory – Attempting to Rise by Mette Sterre gives value to the devalued, both aesthetically and conceptually. Emerging as a monstrous femme creature with rotating manicured fingers and accompanied by a talking cyborg dog, the artist makes room for exploring and exploding the power structures that silently—although violently—regulate our lives.
In GRUNT by Diane Mahín, a woman communicates solely through growling. The growler navigates various moods, telling what seems to be an urgent story or holding a seemingly intimate conversation. As she attempts to tell a joke, trauma-laden growls twist humor into a shadowy reflection.
G will present a fourth version of a continuous adaptation: MISSED CALL, a series of ongoing performances. How grief shapes time and how time shapes grief. Alright Dad. BITW. MISSED CALL L.
Get your ticket via the Eventbrite page.
Doors — 19:00
Programme — 19:30-21:00
Admission fee: €12
Students: €8
ADE pass: Free
Mette Sterre is a visual artist who investigates the limits and transformative potential of the body. Her work resists categorization, fusing performance, sculpture, body masks, and digital technology into immersive, otherworldly environments that explore the threshold between the organic and the artificial. By entering her work we are cast into the materialisation of her mind processes: a sensorial and embodied experience.
Diane Mahín is a performance maker and sociologist who creates visceral, performative worlds shaped by sound and image. Her work dissects the body as a social artifact: fleshy, noisy, and molded by social absurdities. A single sound from the body can open an entire world. Diane follows this sound, tears it apart, and reassembles it into theatrical codes drawn from the learned behaviors of an unbearable society. The strange becomes eerily familiar. In that disarming recognition, audiences encounter something disturbingly intimate: themselves, shaped by a brutal world.
G: “Suburbs, Mall/s, Shopping Centres. People who are really ‘into’ things / Subcultures. Mourning, natural death. Graveyards. Urns. Memorial pictures. Bits n Bobs. Raves. The ‘Anti Bio’. ‘Non performers’, ‘Non Dancers’ everything that we are told we are not good at or need a qualification for. Humour x 10000000000000000000000000. Power Dynamics. Eye rolls from children. Writing how I speak.” (Edited* to fit the word count, the bio continues) – G
Photos by Gergely László Ofner
Step into a night of gruesome extravagance at Temper Tantrum Bonehouse’s Monster Ball, where you’re invited to transform into your biggest fear. Hosted by Mette Sterre, Ainhoa Hernández Escudero, and Taka Taka, with drag performers from the House of Løstbois: Alfa Hoer, blueberriboi, brooms tic, Labello Dickodello, Naza Løtus, Lucian Squid, Helena, Vinny Von Vinci, and LOST TIME, as well as Lady Bag, the Monster Mashers, and with music by Jiji Jizu. Expect creaturely activations, creepy-crawl dancing, shadow play, and ghoulish performances.
Join us in a festive ritual of becoming, an explosion of mania that explores the dark side of your moon (and everyone else’s). A prize awaits the best-dressed monster of the night.
The evening culminates in a Monster Mash protest parade, where monsters reclaim the streets of Amsterdam. The parade leads us to Club Church, where the ball continues deep into the night in an intense embrace of the danse macabre.
Please note: This event is 18+
Please note: We encourage visitors to come in costume as much as possible, since there is no dressing room at the event. The toilets will of course be available to change, and to do touch-ups or finishing touches. We will also have an (unattended) cloakroom in the front space of W139. There will always be two hosts there, but it will be at your own risk.
Doors — 19:00
Programme — 19:30-22:00
Admission: €12
Students: €8
Get your ticket via the Eventbrite page.
House of Løstbois is the first drag king house established in the Netherlands, founded in 2019. It is a warm, queer space that welcomes underrepresented people in the drag community, using the walls of the fetish Club Church as their headquarters. Living queerly for Løstbois involves meeting weekly to play with makeup and costumes, rehearse for the sake of rehearsing, and share processes and stories of our reality. A reality lived within patriarchal archetypes.
Photos by Gergely László Ofner
In this roundtable conversation with Dr. Bert Derkx and Mette Sterre, you are invited to reflect on and dissect the Temper Tantrum Bonehouse experience. Together with the audience, we’ll explore what it means to return to the body and step out of the head.
Through conversation, we’ll consider how kinesthetics and movement keep us in touch with our reality, while also offering pathways into other realms. Themes include embodied knowledge, notions of sensing, non-linear forms of creation, and we will challenge the idea that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”
Dr. Bert Derkx and Mette Sterre met during her residency at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, where she investigated the humbling physical force of intuition. Dr. Derkx’s insights into the sensations of the body deeply shaped Mette’s artistic practice—informing both its mental and physical dimensions.
Buy your ticket via the Eventbrite page.
This event will be in English.
Doors — 16:00
Programme — 16:30-18:00
Admission fee: €5
Bert Derkx works as an advisor at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam, where he acts as a bridge between art and science. Until he fell ill, he worked as a pediatrician and psychoanalyst, with one of his areas of interest being the construction of mind-body dualism in Western biomedical discourse. As an anthropologist and art historian, he is interested in the cultural diversity of perspectives on the body. These aspects also form the basis for his keen interest in the way contemporary artists depict the body in all its facets.
Mette Sterre is a visual artist who investigates the limits and transformative potential of the body. Her work resists categorization, fusing performance, sculpture, body masks, and digital technology into immersive, otherworldly environments that explore the threshold between the organic and the artificial. By entering her work we are cast into the materialisation of her mind processes: a sensorial and embodied experience.
Photos by Jesse Vorswijk
We invite you to a scary storytelling night, presented in collaboration with Mezrab, and hosted by Sahand Sahebdivani. Come listen as a group of storytellers bring the Temper Tantrum Bonehouse to life—sending shivers down your spine and perhaps even awakening a few ghosts along the way.
At the border of our physical bodies and the shadowed side of our minds dwell creatures, spirits, and entities that are more than human—often elusive and hard to trace. Some of us have had encounters that, to others, might sound like ghost stories, while in many cultures these same experiences are seen as omens. Once such a story is shared, its survival depends on the collective. Do you hear a ghost story, or do you recognize a life lesson?
Storytellers: Nicole Santé, Ogutu Muraya, Irina Koriazova.
Walk in and soup — 18:30-19:30
Programme — 19:30-21:00
Admission: €5
Sign up via the Eventbrite page of the event.
Mezrab is an Amsterdam based platform for storytelling and an important initiator in the development of storytelling as an art form in the Netherlands. Mezrab serves as a source of inspiration for many theatres, centers, museums and festivals to program storytelling.
Photos by Jesse Vorswijk
The workshop-filled day shows how the Doe-Het-Zelf Werkplaats collectively designed and built a party office for the PPP by making armor to protect yourself, floating ink printing, book-binding, and writing mythical stories.
Our impulse in taking on this project was to develop collective structures and working methods: How do we co-create a design? Allocate hours and responsibilities? Make decisions? We embraced infrastructures that let us improvise, hold complexity, and share a foundation (and Excel sheets), aiming to make this knowledge portable. Now that we’ve finished our build-up, we want to reflect as a collective on how our intentions arrived in practice. The office is also a working site: for growing potatoes, making ink, posters, publications, and potato paper—alongside items from the PPP fabriek, in the rear of W139.
Doe-Het-Zelf Werkplaats is a free-to-use, collectively-run (squatted) workshop space and community garden in Rotterdam operated by volunteers. Visitors come to fix their bikes with tools and spare parts that have been donated while neighbors can freely harvest herbs from the garden. Centered around learning together, reciprocal generosity, and anti-judgement, the space creates a welcoming environment where folks can safely relate to each other on the border of what they know and what they are trying to figure out. DHZ consists of Deniz Gülyurt, M.B. McGregor, Christian Lesmes, Florian Henschel, Sapozhnikov Mikhail, Linda Zeb Hang, Tomi Hilsee and Saina Salarian.
Programme
DHZ Introduction
12:00 – 13:00
Rhythmic Publications: Floating Ink Printing And Binding
Linda Zeb Hang
13:00 – 15:00
Learn the flow of Suminagashi, or the art of Japanese water marbling, which in this workshop is a large-scale collaborative printmaking process. Participants will be guided through the steps of using natural brushes to create floating ink designs on water with accordion wind fans to manipulate the surface. They will then transfer the design onto paper by hand pulling each unique print. Participants will be using 6 colors of inks to create the designs in a water vat installed at W139, and make up to 4 small and 4 medium sized prints. Prints will be bound into a booklet during the following workshop, folded into signatures and bound by hand using needle and thread.
Linda Zeb Hang is a queer Hmong-American, Rotterdam-based artist best known for their conceptual artist’s books, hypnagogic book design, sculptural installations, fine art printmaking and experimental video art. Their content of scanning voices cross-sections the invisible density, flavor profiles, and omniscient presence of the woven, yet frayed environment. They consider innovative organizing to be objective oxygen, interacting with media to animate the duality and ‘non-duality’ of space. They shape sound and material cultures through technical experimentation, working spontaneously, collecting and generating information to arrive at a knotty mixed-media synthesis. Flexibility, instinct and intuition are their chosen guides. Their tools are digital, machine age and ‘primitive.’
Mythical Storytelling: Potato Power Parables
Deni
14:00 – 16:00
This month, we dug beneath the surface —literally and metaphorically— with the potato as our guide. Often used to spin colonial myths, the potato reveals the tangled truths of global history: how the resources of the Global South have long fed the North, even as modern narratives claim the opposite. In this workshop, we’ll explore how dominant stories —crafted by colonial and capitalist powers— have shaped our understanding of history, identity, and belonging. We’ll ask: Whose stories get told, and whose are silenced? Together, we’ll read a short excerpt to break the spell of so-called “realistic” capitalist storytelling, then turn to the empowering art of mythical storytelling. Through writing laments, prayers, dreams, and wishes, we’ll reclaim our voices and imagine new worlds. Whether you want to mourn what’s lost, dream of what could be, or simply tell the world as you see it, this is a space to write the stories only you can tell. Come ready to question, imagine, and write your own myths—rooted in truth, resistance, and possibility.
Deni is a Rotterdam-based collective member who is interested in topics of individuality, nature of experience and perception, and creating multi-sensory media for self-expression. She is studying neuroscience and working in a wet lab everyday, where she gets to test and explore her own perceptual space and relatedness to the living organisms she is “manipulating.” She brings together her different selves to explore the boundaries of her material existence and expresses these ideas mostly through music, collages, and drawings.
Press Play and Protect: Making Wearable Resistance (Armor) & A Sonic Ceremony of Collective Resilience
MB McGregor and Saina (DHZ)
15:00 – 18:00
This workshop brings together making and listening as ways to think about protection—both personal and collective. We’ll start with a hands-on session where you can create wearable pieces using discarded bike parts, soft fabrics, and found objects. Think of it as DIY armor: something that holds strength, softness, protest, or play. Materials like inner tubes, chains, grommets, and fabric will be provided, with space to experiment and shape things in your own way. You can follow examples, ask for support, or just dive in freely.
MB (MaryBrown) McGregor is a Rotterdam-based, California born landscape architect, DJ and queer interdisciplinary artist whose practices live at the intersection of spatial design, social intervention, and collective resistance. They work to challenge status quos — whether through public space design, interactive installations, or nightlife politics.
Saina is a Netherlands-based Iranian researcher and organizer. Their work floats somewhere between music and politics. Centering radical care and joyful activism in their work, Saina’s interests range from sound to solidarity; they aim to weave a sound tapestry dedicated to the interconnected struggles for liberation.
Sonic Ceremony
18:00 – 20:00
Later, we’ll shift into a shared listening session—a kind of sonic ceremony—featuring a mix of sounds and songs of resistance from different parts of the world. This will be an intentional space to sit or move with grief, rage, and uncertainty—transforming these emotions through sound and shared presence. In a world where relentless atrocities stream constantly into our hands, this gathering offers a moment to pause, listen deeply, and process together. Through movement, sound, or writing, we channel stagnant political rage into imagination, action, solace, and resistance. No experience is needed—just openness.
Come to build, to listen, to be with others in a space where making becomes a form of resistance, and sound becomes a way of holding space. Whether you’re crafting armor or simply showing up, this workshop is about presence, protection, and protest in many forms.
On the 27th of July, the PPP will leave the spaces of W139. After two months and more then 20 workshops, this day will be turned into a small harvest festival. You are very welcome to join! Together with all the participants and contributors, we will celebrate everything that has been sprouting, growing and surfacing during the last months.
Expect a showcase of workshop results on the catwalk of the Doe-Het-Zelf Werkplaats, heated potato debates at Jody Aikman’s Potato Parliament, and snacks made with home-grown potatoes—freshly harvested at 4Siblings—in the kitchen of the Paniek Fabriek by bende van de glittervingers.
Together we will close off the PPP’s passage at W139 with potatoes, music and drinks.
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.
In this workshop series we will collectively learn about polyculture and the life cycle of plants—from seed to sowing, to growth, and harvest. In May, we collectively planted a variety of PPPotato-species during a Potato Growing Workshop. On the 25th of July, from 16.00 onwards, we will see what happened below the surface and harvest the grown potatoes.
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 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 closed shoes and bring a bottle of water. No experience with farming or performance is needed.
Location: 4Siblings veld: President Allendelaan 1, Amsterdam (Google Maps pin)
Reserve your spot on the Eventbrite-page of the event.
Participation is free, but donations are very welcome.
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.
On the weekend of 19 and 20 July, Absent Academy celebrates their 100-year anniversary, dedicated to the memory of those who have been forcibly disappeared. Sîpan Sezgin Tekin and Agat Sharma are opening their work space during an open rehearsal, asking the question: “How can a performative space provide a ground for disappeared knowledge to be present?”
They invite the audience to participate in a drawing exercise that explores how to speak about enforced disappearances under the looming threat of state violence and surveillance. They imagine a new country—one where it is possible to confront and process enforced disappearances. Maybe a new country for all those who have been made to disappear by the deep state.
Participation is free, Reserve your spot on the Eventbrite-page of the event.
Absent Academy is a semi-public pedagogic space, aiming to think about enforced disappearances, which is an extrajudicial practice employed by deep state actors across Central and South Asia.
Agat Sharma is an artist, educator and theater maker who focuses on long-term research into the history of cotton. Through theatrical experiments, he explores the pre-colonial legacy of cotton, colonial extractivism and the ongoing agricultural crisis in India. His work focuses on themes that explore the origin, evolution and erasing of the relationship between land and body. Agat uses a broad view of what a song and a story can be, and uses them as instruments to bring collective postcolonial imaginations to life. Agat works both in the Netherlands and in India.
Sîpan Sezgin Tekin, born in Amed/Kurdistan, is a multidisciplinary performer and theatre maker whose work explores political and historical narratives through the embodied use of language. Focusing on multilingualism, language physicality, and identity politics, he creates immersive performances that examine the role of mother tongue in shaping identity, performance, and the perception of borders and nationality. Sîpan based in Turkey and in The Netherlands.
