Performance

ADE x DARKMATTER: Sapodilla

A special electronic sound programme organized by DARKMATTER Collective featuring musical performances by Amanah and Maguette Dieng that center marginalized voices, diasporic perspectives, and cultural transformation. In collaboration with Amsterdam Dance Event.

Sapodilla is DARKMATTER Collective’s signature electronic music event, presenting a listening session inside W139 with local and international artists. Since its launch in 2022, Sapodilla has reimagined club culture as a space where electronic sound, artistic experimentation and community converge, centering marginalized voices and diasporic perspectives.

Named after a fruit native to the tropical Americas, with deep roots in Indigenous histories of cultivation and knowledge, Sapodilla takes the fruit as a symbol of movement and cultural transformation. Its journeys across the Caribbean and beyond resonate with DARKMATTER’s engagement with histories shaped by indigeneity, colonialism, slavery, migration and creolization—and with the cultures and communities that have endured, transformed and flourished through them.

Ticket: €10
Student and solidarity ticket: €7,50
Free for ADE Pro passholders.

Buy your tickets via Eventbrite.

Plum Road Tea Dream_The Hangout

Plum Road Tea Dream_The Hangout is a relaxed performance centered around the autobiographical video game Plum Road Tea Dream created by artist Samuel Baidoo. The work explores how we can imagine new spaces for grief, healing, commemoration and transformation. Equal parts honest conversation, collective gaming session, tea ceremony and ritual, it invites audiences into an intimate but casual space of reflection and shared experience. For this edition of _The Hangout at W139 Samuel will enter into a dialogue with The Nature of Remembering initiating artist Lawil Karama.

Ticket: €10
Student and solidarity ticket: €7,50

Buy your tickets via Eventbrite.

Samuel Baidoo (they/them) is a creator, performer, game designer and mentor. Alongside their work in the Hanafubuki artist collective, Baidoo also works in various collaborative constellations and maintains their individual practice, which links autobiographical experiences to diverse performances through a constantly evolving archive of images, fragments of text, film stills, documentaries, musical pieces, or excerpts from series, films, games, or manga—popular culture has a special place in their heart.

Lawil Karama (she/her) is a Ugandan-Dutch conceptual artist born in former West Berlin and based in Amsterdam. Her work is deeply rooted in the diasporic experience, often drawing from her family history as a starting point for challenging conventional narratives and amplifying unheard voices. Karama’s creative path began in the world of special make-up effects, which continues to influence her approach, bringing a visceral understanding of form, surface, and psychological tension into her current work.

Image: still from Plum Road Tea Dream (2026) by Samuel Baidoo.

20–23°C / 50% RH

In this performative activation of 350.000 Leaks (Griefs), Aram Lee and artist Merapi Obermayer invite participants into an intergenerational gathering of reading, storytelling, oral histories, and call-and-response.

Moving across generations, national borders, bodies, and languages, 20–23°C / 50% RH questions the hegemonic logic of the universal institutional climate established through conservation in European ethnocolonial museums. Rather than approaching preservation as permanence, the gathering begins from an understanding of care as a practice of transmission, translation, and transformation. Through personal memories, oral histories, excerpts from the work, and related texts, the group explores how memories, losses, and climates pass between and through bodies. Together, Lee, Obermayer, and the session participants seek other climates that emerge through ongoing acts of translation and cannot be reduced to fixed measurements.

Ticket: €10
Student and solidarity ticket: €7,50

Buy your tickets via Eventbrite.

Aram Lee (she/her) is an artist, writer, and educator. Grounded in feminist materialist thinking, her practice examines how histories of power, militarization, occupation, and toxicity are embedded within landscapes, bodies, and ecological matter. Working across moving image, installation, and research-based projects, she draws on oral histories, scientific inquiry, and site-specific investigation to reveal marginalized narratives, material memory, and alternative ways of sensing place.

Merapi Obermayer (she/her) is an artist, poet, and writer born in 1947. Obermeyer calls her work “Fragments in passing,” which bring together various disciplines based on her own colonial history and the issues it raises. The city became her natural habitat—there she meets people who, just like her, have become detached from their original landscape; people who are, day after day, creating their own landscapes, which cannot be taken away by others and which can be carried forever. You can bury your roots, your childhood, but never forever. There is no need to show them to the world. They come out of their own accord. Right now, Obermayer’s attention is focused on photography, projects that are never finished, and writing.

Image: 350,000 Leaks (Griefs) (2024) by Aram Lee, documentation of the live radio broadcast at Wereldmuseum Amsterdam.

Urban Healing Fabulation: Participatory Performance

So, we have the herbs. We have the salves, the tinctures, the macerations and the fermentations. We have been asking questions about the witches put on trial just around the corner at the Dam square, finding out that we might not be too far away. But what does a modern day crip healer do? How and what do they heal? What is health anyway? Join us for a Healing Fabulation where we carefully listen to your problems and offer health to your late stage capitalism induced chronic conditions (!).

Our Para-siting space is located on the first floor which can only be reached via a set of stairs. If you are visiting any of our public programme and you have any access needs, please let us know so we may try to accommodate best within our capacity. For this event our normal ticket prices are applicable. For more info see Contact & Visit.

Reserve your spot here!

Pırıltı Onukar has been exploring the themes of belonging and community through experiential process-based and often situated multidisciplinary work, film, participatory performances, translation, farming and foraging. She is currently focusing most of her attention on the artist-run collective GROND Bajesdorp.

Ilja Schamlé is an artist and writer with an amateur herbal and social medicine practice, yet always stuck on when these things tip over from something liberatory into something lonely, esoteric and de-politicised. She is an all round janitor of a community and residency space called Massia.

Melted for Love — Locating Lost Voices

Join us for an evening that moves between research, sonic fiction, and the act of listening as resistance. The programme begins with an artist talk with Emiddio Vasquez of Lower Levant Company, and Diana Policarpo, who will introduce the research behind Bugio Radio Station, focusing on echolocation and other techniques for tracing non-human sound. Together, they discuss how listening can reveal the impact of militarisation and colonial infrastructure on surrounding ecosystems.

The night continues with Every Day Things Disappear by Urok Shirhan, a live performance unfolding as a sonic fiction from the occupied land of ‘ABC’, where words, colours, feelings – and eventually futures – are systematically erased. Told through a fragmented first-person narrator, the work slips between satire and sorrow, tracing the quiet violence of censorship. Blending spoken word with archival murmurs and encrypted song fragments, it conjures a world where remembering becomes a subversive act. Every Day Things Disappear is both lament and code, auto-myth and resistance ritual. It asks how we listen when speech dissolves and what songs take shape in silence.

This programme is part of the Biennial exhibition Melted for Love at W139, where Lower Levant Company’s and Diana Policarpo’s works are on display.

Programme
Wednesday 25 February
18:00-20:00

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.

A Hairstylist tries to realize his long live dream of becoming a Super Star who steals ALL the lights on EVERY stage. Together with Clara Saito as The Mentor, every hairdo/hairdon’t, becomes an opportunity to shine on the stage. Sign up for a hairdo or hairdon’t to help make the Hairstylist dream come true! We need you!

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.

Photos by Diego Diez

phANTASMAL HAIRSALON

Photos by Diego Diez

SNDO: D.R.E.D.G.E.

SNDO presents: D.R.E.D.G.E. by Elisa Zuppini and Toni Steffens, in collaboration with musician Soraya Lutangu Bonaventure and SNDO 2 & 3. A program with guest appearances by Pauline de Groot and Thomas Lehmen.

D.R.E.D.G.E. 2025 is a work by Elisa Zuppini and Toni Steffens, created at the invitation of SNDO – School for New Dance Development. Over the course of a two-week workshop, they engaged with second- and third-year students, leading toward public presentations in December.

As part of the 50-year jubilee marking the founding of SNDO, Elisa and Toni entered into dialogue with Pauline de Groot, exploring her extensive choreographic oeuvre and its new life within the online archive (paulinedegroot.nl). During the Performing the Archive: Pauline de Groot Festival in November 2024 at Plein Theater—hosted and curated by Fransien van der Putt—they shared their initial explorations of Pauline’s choreographies. Extending this intergenerational dialogue between choreographers who share lineages and references yet diverge into their own distinct practices, SNDO invited Elisa and Toni to take the next step.

During the 50-year celebration in June 2025, Pauline performed a duet with fellow SNDO alumnus Thomas Lehmen. This meeting evolved into ongoing weekly movement practice sessions at the Academy of Theatre and Dance.

Lines and lineages of vigor and persistence—bodies and dances—will converge in two days of public presentations. The program features a duet by Pauline de Groot and Thomas Lehmen, followed by D.R.E.D.G.E., the choreography by Elisa Zuppini and Toni Steffens, performed together with 16 SNDO students. Costume and styling by Noam Gil Shuster.

Tickets
You can reserve tickets online here

D.R.E.D.G.E. explores possibilities for giving a body to both the friction and coalescence of different time zones interfering with one another. Revolving around the joy of dance, this process is an experiment in testing movement lineages and histories of practices.

SNDO – School for New Dance Development offers a full time four-year professional education course leading to a Bachelor’s degree in Art – Choreography. The school was founded in 1975 as an attempt to find new directions for dance next to the existing forms and styles that dominated the field. After fifty years, the SNDO remains inquisitive, open minded, and in the foreground of progressive developments in the fields of dance and performance. In the curriculum, the school establishes the conditions from which the creativity of the student can emerge. Reflection on the specific qualities of dance and performance as art forms is developed, and awareness of the body and the artistic, social and political implications of working with it take precedence. The SNDO is part of Academy of Theatre and Dance at the Amsterdam University of the Arts.

Para-siting: phANTASMAL HAIRSALON

phANTASMAL HAIRSALON openingsdagen
— Friday 21 November 18:00-21:00 opening of phANTASMAL HAIRSALON
— Sunday 23 November 14:00-17:00 HAIRSALON open, with Raoni and Taka Taka
— Wednesday 17 December 14:00-17:00 HAIRSALON open, with Raoni and Clara Saito
— Friday 19 December 14:00-17:00 HAIRSALON open, with Raoni and Clara Saito

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 — 18:30

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.

Photo by Pieter Kers