Tag: Para-siting

We welcome Espacio Estamos Bien as our new Para-siting residents. They will be working on their project We do this not because it’s easy, but because we thought it was going to be easy: Mission, Vision, Fiction, a space for autobiographical archiving, collective work sessions with cooperators, landing ideas, laughing, and reflecting—with a view toward a realistic near-present. 

As part of their residency, Espacio Estamos Bien will be celebrating their birthday on 25 May at W139, remember to save the date!

Espacio Estamos Bien is an art cooperative and nomadic project space based in Amsterdam that facilitates gatherings, publications, exhibitions, workshops, and other situations. EEB began by plotting around the idea of a new space in Amsterdam—not necessarily a physical one—that could provide an affectionate and supportive context. A space for those who do not belong in the institutional circuit, one that is always changing, always moving, but always available. 

Is looking back an act of necessity or just nostalgia in disguise? In a time oversaturated with images, references, and remakes, the impulse to return—to retrieve and to reframe—feels inevitable. But who’s hoping to find what? 

So what happens when three outsiders step into an institution’s archive—a space built, rearranged, and stolen from? They ask questions, some quiet, some loud: Who is this? Why do they keep this? They sift, select, document, and romanticize. But really, they wonder, how does an archive, dense with its own relevancies, make room for the new? 

For three weeks at W139, bring your own book presents Clearance, a display and auction where selected ‘valuables’ from the archive will be exhibited—and made available for purchase. Clearance is a temporary shift in ownership, a redistribution of institutional memory and an experiment in circulation. 

Para-siting is a new programme that runs parallel to our exhibition programme. During Para-siting, W139 will allow other organisms to take over, providing space for encounters and the exchange of ideas, allowing for a more flexible and rapid response to current or urgent developments.

Visual identity by Studio Buy My Talent.

We are very excited to present Para-siting, a new programme that runs parallel to our exhibition programme. Para-siting is our response to the tremendous urgency we saw during W139 hosts… to create space for experimentation, try-outs, and work in progress. From 24 February to 30 March 2025, our first Para-siting project is Remove the Dot.

The work Remove the Dot is an ongoing research program by Saja Amro and Wassila Abboud that takes guidance from historical and present voices at the forefront of the liberation struggle. The program is in response to European institutional censorship which tends to obfuscate the material reality in Palestine. Through both a personal and material lens, Saja and Wassila explore how knowledge production in contexts of oppression and revolution help us to linger in spaces of imagination, specifically for those from the Palestinian and Lebanese resistance. 

The work so far has evolved through various forms including diagrams, public sessions, reading groups, and study days. The recent on-going program  explores the concept of martyrdom and the commitment to sacrifice for a land; requiring a rationality incomprehensible within western frameworks. Saja and Wassila will use their time, as part of the Para-siting program, to reflect on the previous iteration of the work, evolve it, and focus on the key question of how they can expand the research to create an open source tool, inviting a wider range of people to collaborate. 

This series derives its name from Zakaria Zubeidi, a political prisoner who, along with five others, attempted to liberate himself from the high-security Israeli prison, Gilboa. Zakaria was arrested before he could complete his thesis. In a call with his lawyer, he asked her to remove the dot from the final paragraph he had written, symbolizing his wish for the story and the cultivation of knowledge to continue until liberation. His literal words translate to “Remove the Dot.”

Visual identity by Studio Buy My Talent.

The Dutch call it “het privaat”, the English “privy”. The toilet in particular (the bathroom has a slightly broader meaning) is a space where you are mostly on your own, in full privacy. But not with a smartphone. The internet invades that sacred space at any given moment. Even if you think you’re alone, you are not.

Klaas Koetje transforms the toilet group of W139 into the ultimate private sphere. FLUSH #5 encourages the visitor—whether they are there for a sanitary stop, to withdraw from the crowd for a moment or for any other reason—to reconnect with the private self and reflect on the intrusion of technology in aspects of life as banal as taking a piss.

Klaas Koetje is a self-taught multimedia artist based in Groningen and a certified legend. We are honored that he agreed to be a part of FLUSH.

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 Mauro Benavidez
Production by Julia Nowicka and Clara Rojas
Design by Josefina Contin