Performance

Para-siting: phANTASMAL HAIRSALON

phANTASMAL HAIRSALON is a multidisciplinary art exhibition and performance choreographed by Raoni Muzho Saleh in co-creation with Karin Iturralde Nurnberg. W139 will transform into a campy, draggy hair salon where members of the public—the Clients—undergo a fabulous (or fabulously wrong) performative hair transformation by wearing a sculptural hairstyle while the rest of the public watches the performance.

Book an appointment, get crowned with a sculptural hairdo by the Hairstylist—a shady yet passionate character—and then strut it outside. Wearing our avant-garde, fabulous hair-do (or hair-don’t), you turn the streets into a campy moving exhibition and a cheeky drag protest against a sterilized world. phANTASMAL HAIRSALON aims to bring back, albeit momentarily, the old days when uncanny, colorful figures would prance the streets proudly. Be aware that there is no cutting involved—but a revival of look and spirit is guaranteed.

phANTASMAL HAIRSALON opening days
— Friday 21 November
— Sunday 23 November
— Wednesday 17 December
— Friday 19 December

Opening hours will be announced soon.

Raoni/Muzho Saleh is a Hazara/Dutch artist using performance, installation and the sound of mourning and moaning to twist and reshape narratives of (cultural) becoming. His work’s focus is to play with the personal, social and political edges. Imbuing his love for art, with body, spirit and politics through movement, voice and textile, he creates temporary immersions into Otherworldly feeling, relations and thought.

Karin Iturralde Nurnberg is an artist working with storytelling in multidisciplinary and sculptural installations. She is born and raised in Ecuador and lives and works in Amsterdam. In her practice she embraces improvisation and the power of spontaneous performative and sculptural interventions, to re-arrange the world around her and shift weighted positions.

Ash Above, Show Below — Finissage

Join us for the finissage of Temper Tantrum Bonehouse, a ritual of goodbye with a performative guided tour through the exhibition by Mette Sterre. This is the very last opportunity to still physically visit the Bonehouse, one final time before it slips into memory and lingers only in weary minds. This finissage is both a farewell and a transformation: a memorial where the end becomes a new beginning, where the Bonehouse, like the Ouroboros, sheds its skin to become something else.

Expect murmurs of melancholy, reflections spoken aloud, and resuscitation after the Dutch elections. But mostly: expect a final activation of the Bonehouse—a last gesture by Mette Sterre, bringing the Bonehouse to life once more before it self-dissolves and goes up in smoke forever.

Doors — 17:00
Performative guided tour — 17:30
Drinks — 18:00

Tickets available at the door.
Admission fee: €5

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.

DNK Amsterdam Experimental Music Festival Weekend — Day 2

DNK Amsterdam invites you to a participatory performance on Beursplein. The Social Music Club plays To Cast A Net… by Koen Nutters: a group piece for sine tones in the public space.

To Cast A Net… is a piece that asks performers to gather and create an electronic net, cast over the auditory reality of everyday life, by simply playing one electronic tone of a particular height on each on their phones, and thereby augmenting and highlighting the public space we are occupying.

The tones will create subtle beatings with each other and with sounds in the environment while performers slowly switch places, and form a moment and place for intensified listening to the world while abiding in the open city for a performative pause, a moment to reflect on the use and function of public space, society as a whole, and our place in it, as people, artists, and sounding entities.

Please sign up in advance if you want to participate. Please send an email to koennutters@gmail.com
Bring an umbrella in case of rain

Start performance — 15:00
Location — Beursplein

The Social Music Club is a loose collective of musicians and non-musicians who regularly come together to listen, make sound, talk about interaction, and try different types of text scores and exercises from the book Search & Reflect: A Music Workshop Handbook, compiled by students of the late percussionist, improviser, and teacher John Stevens.

DNK Agenda

DNK Amsterdam Experimental Music Festival Weekend — Day 1

In the context of the DNK is DONE… residency DNK Amsterdam presents a concert night with two sets of cutting edge and quite classical experimental music by a quartet of young musicians based in The Hague and an ensemble of ragtag experimentalists, professionals and hobbyists alike, from the Amsterdam region aka The Social Music Club.

Programme
Saturday 22 November
Montoriol, Eckhardt, McGuire, & De Gendt — Simultaneous / Synchronous (Song)
The Social Music Club — Stones (Christian Wolff) and The Great Learning – Paragraph 7 (Cornelius Cardew)
Afterwards music by the DNK DJ team

Roc Montoriol, Jacob Eckhardt, Lawrence McGuire, Cis De Gendt are a The Hague-based quartet, sharing an interest in perception and attention in relation to presentation formats, playback media, volumes and space-time. Their work currently utilizes amplification, sound recordings, electro-acoustic devices, objects, and voice.

For this performance at W139, they reimagine DNK ensemble’s 2017 performance: Simultaneous / Synchronous (Song) with (synthetic) voice and non-pitched sound materials layered across a range of playback devices. They take inspiration from its forming of relations, the structural repetition of re-starting and re-shifting, and the masking that occurs.

Watch a version of the original performance here.

The Social Music Club is a loose collective of musicians and non-musicians who regularly come together to listen, make sound, and talk about interaction. They try different types of text scores and exercises from the book Search & Reflect: A Music Workshop Handbook, compiled by students of the late percussionist, improviser, and teacher John Stevens.

They will perform a simultaneous performance of Christian Wolff’s Stones and Cornelius Cardew’s The Great Learning – Paragraph 7.

DNK Agenda

DNK Amsterdam Monday Night Concert #2

Programme
Anne La Berge — Flute and electronics
Gert-Jan Prins — Electronics and percussion

Doors — 19:30
First set — 20:00

Entrance by donation

Anne La Berge’s passion for the extremes in both composed and improvised music has led her to the fringes of storytelling and sound art as her sources of musical inspiration. She performs as a multimedia soloist and in projects both live and online and is one of the composer/performers in the Amsterdam based ensemble MAZE.

In 1999, together with Steve Heather and Cor Fuhler, she founded Kraakgeluiden, an improvisation series based in Amsterdam, exploring combinations of acoustic and electronic instruments using real-time interactive performance systems. Many of the resulting musical collaborations have taken on a life beyond the Kraakgeluiden series, which ceased in 2006.

La Berge will perform Third Nature, a performance with storytelling, processed flute, synthesized and sampled audio, sirens, improvisations and other stuff. It includes parts of her compositions from 2005 to ones that are currently works-in-progress.

Gert-Jan Prins (b. 1961 in IJmuiden) focuses on the sonic and musical qualities of electronic noise and percussion, and investigates their relationship with the visual. While he started his career as a drummer, his works now include performances, sound installations, compositions, electronic circuits, and numerous collaborations with other musicians, visual artists, composers, and dancers.

DNK Agenda

DNK is DONE… hosts The Social Music Club

The Social Music Club is an initiative by Aimée Theriot and Koen Nutters. In just a few words: it is a musical improvisation session without dogmas, where the emphasis lies on meeting, and getting to know each other, while also discussing, bringing into practice, and stretching the understanding of what exactly music is, and can be. For musicians, non-musicians, amateurs, and professionals alike.

The Social Music Club concentrates on methods for group improvisation by John Stevens and text scores from various contemporary and historical sources to play music together in a thoughtful and attentive environment.

Bring instruments, objects, words, voices, bodies. With a drink afterwards in a bar nearby.

Doors — 20:00
Start programme — 20:10

Free entrance and full participation

Organized and facilitated by Aimée Theriot and Koen Nutters.

DNK Agenda

DNK Amsterdam Monday Night Concert #1

In the context of the Para-siting project DNK is DONE… DNK Amsterdam presents a concert night with two solo sets of cutting edge electronic music by two of the Netherland’s finest performer-composers.

Programme
Danya Pilchen — Feedback systems
Rubén Patiño — Repetitive synthetic patterns

Doors — 19:30
First set — 20:00

Entrance by donation

Danya Pilchen is a composer based in The Hague. His main interest lies in the human experience of time and music’s ability to shed light on it. He has composed for a wide range of settings, including solo, ensemble, and orchestra, as well as theatre productions. A significant part of his practice involves creating immersive sound installations that incorporate instrumental performances.

Danya’s music is closely intertwined with his research into collective experiences of time in musical practices. Understanding time as an emerging property of consciousness affected by social interactions necessitates increased attention to the relationships between musicians and audiences in Danya’s pieces. To facilitate these interactions, he employs various compositional strategies and listening techniques engaging the materiality of sound.

Rubén Patiño is an artist who explores sound generated by electronic means and its potential to transform the perception of space. His practice often challenges standardized formats of presentation, blending the boundaries between concert, public event, and installation. Solo or in collaboration, Patiño’s works have been presented in museums, clubs, festivals, and galleries across Europe, America, Asia, Africa, Russia, and Australia. He has published on labels such as Anòmia, Haunter Records, Diagonal Records, The Trilogy Tapes, Where To Now?, The Death of Rave, and Gang of Ducks.

DNK Agenda

Desert Without Sand: Third 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.

Third sequence
HOHOON
A Hoofed Hole-Ontology after the Development Catastrophe

[A Reading of 40’]

A performative reading from the work-in-progress The Bestiary of the Developmentocene, mixing images and sound (herding songs, field recordings and spoken text). HOHOON (هوهون ⵀⵓⵀⵓⵏ) appears not as metaphor but as a theory-fictional character. Knowledge moves through apertures, wells, hoof-cups, lee-shadows, pauses, rather than along smooth survey lines across a flattened Sahara. From this vantage, the dromedary is a site of co-sentiency and collaboration: survival as shared breath, tracked routes, and the exchange of thirst. The hole exists only when human and dromedary breathe, thirst, and remember.

AZ OOR (b. 1992) is a visual artist, noisist, storyteller, and poet living between Marrakech and Rotterdam. An Amazigh Futurist, AZ OOR’s practice operates at the intersection of fiction, history, and futurity. It is grounded in narrative speculation and a critique of the material and temporal conditions of the Developmentocene, a colonial and terraforming sphere that tends to accelerate, break, mine, disintegrate, and devitalize sentient and vibrant life into raw material, pure matter, and energy.

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: Fourth Sequence

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.

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.