Para-siting – Page 3

Desert Without Sand: Fourth Sequence

Desert Without Sand: Sequential Practices is a space for contemplation and investigation into the desert as both a physical landscape, an abstract concept, and a site for speculation. Through a cluster of activities, including performative reading, public events, and mapping and diagramming workshops, Sequential Practices aims to navigate and discuss multiple performative practices approaching to the desert’s complexity.

Fourth Sequence
Performance lecture A History of Air Wars In The Ghibli Wind by Tewa Barnosa — 19:00
Open rehearsal Tempodesert — 20:00

A History of Air Wars In The Ghibli Wind is the first chapter of an ongoing film trilogy examining intersections between the gaming and military industries. As part of the Para-siting program with Tempodesert, Tewa Barnosa performs a lecture rehearsal investigating overlooked histories of fascist imperialism in Africa, from Italy’s 1911 first aerial bombing in history to 1980s America’s early War on Terror propaganda and 2011 Nato’s intervention in Libya. The Saharan Ghibli wind carries generational memories across temporalities, revealed through recontested archives, video games, oral poetry, and testimonies, interrogating colonial technologies of desert domination and land extraction.

In this open rehearsal-performance, Tempodesert will share a text and a soundtrack developed during the Para-siting programme at W139. The work unfolds as an ongoing negotiation with and through the desert as a rehearsal of thought, sound, and presence. Through this process, they explore ways of speaking about and with the desert: a site of absence and abundance, of stillness and persistence. The performance traces their methodology of working through speculation, a practice of listening, writing, and reconfiguring, where the desert becomes both a landscape and a method of relation.

Tewa Barnosa is an interdisciplinary artist and cultural practitioner living and working between Tripoli and Amsterdam. Her practice spans visual arts, time-based media, performance, and curatorial collaborations. In her work, she investigates historical and contemporary warfare tactics and theatrics in relation to ecological ecosystems, and exploitation of people, land, and resources. An inquiry into language, technology, visual and digital culture as anti-colonial modes of communication. Through working with video, sound, games and objects, she explores absent archives, Bedouin and Amazigh oral literature and music, fiction and political propaganda. Often to interweave narratives in resistance to systems of alienation while centering generational knowledge.

Tempodesert is a performance-based collaboration between Fay Aldhukair and Mohamed Abdelkarim, with occasional contributions from others. It emerged after experiencing the world “after 8/8,” a term coined when Fay and Abdelkarim watched The Draw of the Desert 8/8 Seminar by Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani on March 15, 2024.

They operate as a performative lab, poetically exploring the holistic and layered temporalities of the desert, geological, ephemeral, eternal, and mythological. Through various mediums such as performances, plays, texts, songs, films, publications, workshops, and walks, Tempodesert seeks to investigate, reclaim, and liberate the desert from colonial narratives and imposed perceptions.

Desert Without Sand: Sequential Practices was made possible by Ettijahat and CBK Rotterdam.

Desert Without Sand: Second Sequence

Mostafa Elbaroody will perform Machines of Infinite Deferral. A conspiracy is unfolding in which the desert is not backdrop but operator, an active agent that conscripts speculative finance into its own logic. Finance does not impose order on the desert, it inherits its grammar: mirage, erosion, opacity, combustion. Both operate through perpetual approach, extracting value from a gap that must never close. The desert scales its hallucinations through derivatives, data, and securitized futures. Egypt’s New Administrative Capital emerges as a ritual site of this alignment, a mirage machine where sovereignty is constructed through its own erosion. Here, the desert infiltrates capital, bending it toward exhaustion and illusion, turning finance into the medium of its metaphysical operations.

Mostafa Elbaroody is a Cairo-based architect and visual artist. He has worked on architectural projects and taught computational design at the American University in Cairo and other educational settings. His artistic practice incorporates various forms of digital image production and processing, from generative design to immersive and interactive experiences, to imagine more representative and viable imaginaries for our co-dependency within ecological and technological systems. Drawing on speculative inquiry, Elbaroody creates visual worlds that sit between research and fiction, examining how we inhabit inherited systems and how we might imagine them otherwise.

Li Qihang is an artist based in Amsterdam. Her practice is underlined by the contemplation of in-betweenness as a state, bringing attention to moments of suspension from the routine, isolated in time, acting as gateways to access the subconscious. She experiences and feels those moments in an ongoing recording practice as a response and dialogue which primarily takes form in journaling and sound gathering.

DNK is DONE… 20 years of DNK Amsterdam

DNK Amsterdam, the ever-adventurous concert series and artist collective for experimental music, sound based art, and performance marks 20 years of activity with concerts and a retrospective publication created during W139’s Para-siting over the month of November. A new generation of performers joins the fold, alongside some familiar faces.

DNK is DONE… hosts The Social Music Club
Wednesday 5 November — 20:00
The Social Music Club

DNK Amsterdam Monday Night Concert #1
Monday 10 November — 19:30
Danya Pilchen (solo) & Rubén Patiño (solo)

DNK Amsterdam Monday Night Concert #2
Monday 17 November — 19:30
Anne La Berge (solo) & Gert-Jan Prins (solo)

DNK Amsterdam Experimental Music Festival Weekend — Day 1
Saturday 22 November — 19:30
Montoriol, Eckhardt, McGuire, De Gendt re-interpret the classic DNK Ensemble performance Simultaneous/Synchronous & The Social Music Club performs pieces by Cornelius Cardew and Christian Wolff. Followed by an after-hang with music by the DNK DJ team.

DNK Amsterdam Experimental Music Festival Weekend — Day 2
Sunday 23 november — 15:00 (Beursplein)
The Social Music Club plays To Cast A Net… by Koen Nutters. A group piece for sine tones in the public space.

DNK Amsterdam is an artist collective actively producing concerts and exhibitions of media, sound and performance artists, as well as their own collective and individual pieces since 2005. Core members are André Avelãs, Seamus Cater, Koen Nutters, and Martijn Tellinga.

Para-siting: Tempodesert

Desert Without Sand came out of urgency to negotiate the multiplicity of the desert as a space of fugitivity, a land of resistance, as space of hermeticism, as nature, as un-nature, as site of erasure, as site of emergence, as stage for speculative futures, as memory keeper, as a map of silence and echoes, as witness, as site of grief, as myth, as home, as desert.

Friday 10 October — First Sequence
Friday 17 October — Second Sequence
Saturday 25 October — Third Sequence
Friday 31 October — Fourth Sequence

Desert Without Sand: Sequential Practices was made possible by Ettijahat and CBK Rotterdam.

Amsterdam Conference of Autonomous Book-Makers

“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.

Between Palestine and Us: publishing in the service of solidarity

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.

Take Back Mokum: squatting, printing, and the right to the city

Against the forces of capital and the housing crisis, squatting is one of our best remaining tactics of resistance. It is also an inherently creative act, transforming buildings, public space, and potentially the whole city. Spooktember opens with the launch of our new zine about the Klokkenhof squat and invites you to explore together how to reclaim the right to the city.

Programme Saturday 13 September

18:00 — Expo opening! Launch of zine Permanence Through Print (made by Layla Gijsen & Boris, published by Spookstad), music by Big Toilet Radio, drinks, art, zines, books.

Programme Sunday 14 September

13:00 — Linocut workshop by Layla Gijsen. Free, but register by sending an email to: laylagijsen@gmail.com

16:00 — Film screening new video work by Yannesh Meijman, with a Q&A after.

Spookstad is a publishing collective that emerged from the squatting movement in Amsterdam. They make books in close collaboration with various activist collectives.

Para-siting: Spooktember

From 13 September, we welcome our new Para-siting residents Spookstad, who are organizing Spooktember—four weekends that explore the art and politics of radical publishing: art, books, workshops, performances, film screenings and more!

“To create is to resist”, the more so when we do it together. During Spooktember, we invite you to explore with us the art and politics of radical publishing.

Mobilizing various forms of creativity in the service of solidarity, Spooktember is a place for reimagining life in the city, the ways publishing interacts with protest and resistance, and coming together to create alternatives.

For four weeks, Spooktember will be home to a radical library and reading corner, the visual art of direct action, and weekly events ranging from workshops to performances and film screenings. The art works and events are based around our publications’ topics, including squatting and the housing struggle, the pro-Palestine student uprising, and the sex workers’ struggle against the Erotic Center, and we wrap up with the very first Amsterdam Conference of Autonomous Bookmakers. Join us for a month of knowledge-sharing, collective discussion, mutual learning, and getting involved.

Spookstad is a publishing collective that emerged from the squatting movement in Amsterdam. They make books in close collaboration with various activist collectives.

100 Years of Absent Academy

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.

Para-siting: Absent Academy

The 100-year celebration of Absent Academy is dedicated to the memory of those who have vanished, ceased to be visible, receded from view, faded, melted, withdrawn, departed, dissipated, dispelled, dematerialised, evaporated. Those who have been forced to disappear. Those with the power to shapeshift and become wind, water and snakes to pass through borders, barricades, checkpoints, fences, walls, watchtowers, frontiers and restricted zones. By force and deception, those in power have made them disappear, but their songs still resonate in the landscape. In this edition of Absent Academy, we will learn to sing these songs and draw out their faces from our dreams.

On 25 June, we will welcome our next Para-siting residents: Absent Academy. Sîpan Sezgin Tekin and Agat Sharma will create a shared 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. In both their cultures, it is possible to talk to those who have ceased to be amongst us through songs and drawings. The form that Absent Academy takes in this edition is that of an open research rehearsal process, towards making a performance to culminate the residency. During the residency, the visitors can join the rehearsal and research process.