Performance – Page 2

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: 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.

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.

W139 x ADE: A Nightmare on Warmoes Street

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

Monster Ball

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

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.