Screening – W139

Gen Alpha ‘Pataphysics

Gen Alpha ’Pataphysics is a film documenting a think tank style workshop with children born after 2010, centred on the theme of money. Developed in collaboration with art educator Studio Dicky, the workshop invited participants to collectively imagine and govern a fictional city, determining how resources should be allocated and which values might underpin economic life.

The film combines scripted text, open discussion and a collaborative role playing game. Ideas surface through logical fallacies, non sequiturs and cognitive leaps, as participants test the coherence of an invented system in real time. What begins as a structured moral and civic debate gradually becomes unstable: as fake currency, theft and improvised rules are introduced, the system is enacted to the point of breakdown.

The film forms part of the broader Gen Alpha ’Pataphysics project: a series of workshops using drawing, writing, acting and speculative design to examine how children understand and reimagine the systems that organise their lives. Alongside the workshop on money, participants also developed the Union of Supernatural Conservation, an imagined organisation advocating for the rights and housing of supernatural beings such as fairies and elves, which is planned to be legally established in Amsterdam concurrent with the film’s screening. While not the focus of the work on show, this parallel strand clarifies the project’s wider methodology: treating children’s speculative reasoning not as metaphor but as a workable model for thinking through governance, care and collective responsibility.

Rather than positioning children as future citizens in preparation, Gen Alpha ’Pataphysics treats them as contributors to the present; the film maintains space for uncertainty, contradiction and novelty, allowing ideas to unfold without resolution or didactic framing. In doing so, it offers a view of economic imagination shaped by lived experience, intuition and play, exposing both the fragility and the productive limits of the systems we continue to inherit and reproduce.

Aaron McLaughlin is an artist and curator based in Amsterdam. Working with those marginalised by institutional processes and appropriating common forms, his practice joins objects, procedures and communities to reframe accessibility and question how art contexts control flows of people, ideas and aesthetics.

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.

The Myth of a Life Sentence, أسطورة المؤبدات

As part of Saja Amro and Wassila Abboud’s on-going research program Remove the Dot, they’ll be screening excerpts from a recent interview with newly released political prisoner Wa’el Jaghoub with a short discussion following the screening.

Wael Naim Ahmed Al-Jaghoub was born in 1967 in Beita, a village south of Nablus. Al-Jaghoub was first arrested in 1992 and spent six years in prison before being released in 1998. His release period was cut short by a second arrest in 2001 which held a significantly harsher sentence of life imprisonment. While this period in prison was also met with harsher daily conditions, including long periods of solitary confinement, he continued to write and wrote several books capturing what he saw and understood from within the prison walls. During this time he also played a significant role in organizing within the prisons, serving as a leading figure in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

In this conversation, Wael recounts his time in prison, and his reflections on the occupation as a fantasy of dust هذا الوحش وهم من غبار. He reflects on the struggles of Palestinian prisoners whose sacrifices would not be in vain.

The event is free but space is limited, so please register via Eventbrite.

Ancient West African Principles

A wasi in JawJaw (2008) is a short documentary film recorded during a trip to the interior of Suriname. Rainbow Soulclub members Ebby Addo and Roy Telgt (a.k.a. Totty) are given a ritual washing and treatment against addiction by Mr. Amou, a local Obiya man (medicine man).

After screening the film, spiritual holistic therapist Orsine Walden will dissect the ritual conducted in A wasi in JawJaw, through a lecture on ancient West African principles.

Orsine Walden is a spiritual healer, poet and holistic therapist applying ancient African principles. Walden descends from the Marron Saamaka freedom fighters, who built their own communities and have resisted slavery not only in Suriname, but also in other regions on the South American continent.

At the age of 17, Walden was initiated by her grandmother Yaadoka into the Winti world of faith. She started her own spiritual holistic therapy practice since age 23.

Buy your ticket on the Eventbrite-page of the event.

Cosmic Entanglements

Since March 2024, Buro Stedelijk has hosted the monthly speculative fiction reading group Goddess Change, initiated by artists Anna Hoetjes and Müge Yılmaz, who are also the initiators of Taking Root Among the Stars. As an extension of the exhibition at W139, Buro Stedelijk will host a film screening evening that brings together films that expand on the quantum realm—using it as a framework to propose different social realities and relationships to time, alternative futures, and communal relations to nature.

The program opens with Larissa Sansour’s The Nation Estate, a 9-minute sci-fi short film and a photo series offering a clinically dystopian, yet humorous approach to the deadlock in the Middle East. With its glossy mixture of computer generated imagery, live actors and an arabesque electronica soundtrack, the Nation Estate film explores a vertical solution to Palestinian statehood. Palestinians have their state in the form of a single skyscraper: the Nation Estate. One colossal high-rise houses the entire Palestinian population – now finally living the high life.

Tres Lunas más Abajo [Three Moons Below] by Patricia Dominguez will have its Netherlands premier as part of this film program. Tres Lunas más Abajo is a spi-fi (spiritual fiction) cinematic exploration that crosses the spiritual and quantum realms. In this fictional universe, CERN’s physics experiments and the astronomical observatories in the Atacama Desert converge with ancient petroglyphs, creating portals that transport the protagonist and her robotic bird companion. Together, they embark on a journey through otherworldly realities, consulting with mystical beings and acquiring celestial antennas and particle detectors.

Domínguez’s personal, futuristic, and unearthly imagery is informed by her extensive research, spanning experimental sites to studies in ethnobotany and South American spiritual practices in plant healing. At the heart of their quest lies a prayer to identify and care for one’s entangled particle. The protagonist contemplates the nature of her entanglement, wondering if it could be with a machine, a wounded bird, or even a star in the distant Andromeda galaxy. The film explores the desire to feel, experience, and learn through these entanglements, offering a world vision in which everything is intertwined in a cosmic knot. By merging ancestral knowledge and contemporary science, the film expands our understanding of the universe beyond the tangible and visible. It advocates for a need to form connections between all living things, machines, and other entities, to develop more sustainable and supportive ways of existing.

The second film in the program is a work from Black Quantum Futurism that documents the Time Zone Protocols (TZP) Surveyors Group and brings together a summary of themes and explorations that took place. Leading up to the Prime Meridian Unconference, Black Quantum Futurism convened the TZP Surveyors Discussion Group–21 individuals who met several times to examine and discuss TZP research materials, including an archive of readings, images, sounds, and videos on time zones, time, temporality, prime meridian, temporal oppression as experienced by Black communities, and social, political, and cultural concepts of time and temporality. The discussion centered on new ways of understanding our relationships to space-time, utilizing specific social, geographical, and cultural frameworks that depart from colonial linearity and shift the standards and protocols of time that leave Black people locked out of the past and future, and stuck in a narrow temporal present.

Location: Buro Stedelijk — Entrance via Paulus Potterstraat 13
Free entrance with ticket — reserve your ticket here

Bios

Larissa Sansour is a Palestinian artist and director. Central to her work is the tug and pull between fiction and reality. In her recent works, she uses science fiction to address social and political issues. Working mainly with film, Sansour also produces installations, photos and sculptures. Sansour lives and works in London.

Patricia Domínguez, born in 1984, Santiago, Chile, is an artist, organic technologist, and Earth defender based in Puchuncaví, Chile. Assembling experimental research on ethnobotany, extractivism and healing practices, her work focuses on tracing digital and spiritual relationships between living species in an increasingly corporate cosmos. She proposes a poetic vision of contemporary life as deeply connected to the earth. She is also the founder of Studio Vegetalista, an experimental platform for ethnobotanical research.

Black Quantum Futurism is an interdisciplinary creative practice, formed in 2014 by Camae Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips, weaving quantum physics, Afrofuturism, and Afrodiasporic concepts of time, space, ritual, and sound to create practical ways to escape negative temporal loops, oppression vortexes, and the digital matrix. By mobilising the past, local histories, and memories, they develop new visions of the future.

Between the Shadow and the Sun

The winter solstice marks the longest night of the year in the Northern hemisphere. This moment, when the sun seems to stand still for a moment, has marked an important transition in our planet’s cycle since the earliest times. On this day we embrace scarcity, abundance, and renewal in this specific cusp in time. During this event we will gather together to celebrate the winter solstice and think about how we can collectively prepare for times of scarcity. Through conversations, cooking and eating together, and watching a film, we will explore how our own human cycles are inextricably tied to the cycles of the seasons and agriculture.

Mariken Heitman, renowned Dutch novelist, educator, and vegetable farmer, will be joining us as a guest. Her work, both in farming and in writing, reflects on how the cultivation of crops can be seen as one of the most intimate relationships between human bodies and their surroundings. In her work she’s also increasingly critical about the artificial division of human and nature. While we prepare food and cook together, we will have a conversation with Mariken to reflect on cycles of growing, harvesting, preserving, celebrating, and resting—both of humans and of the land. We’ll also explore how in literature and in art speculation can be used as a tool to build words and carve out space for new perspectives.

The practices of stocking provisions and creating energy reserves for times of scarcity also carry celebration within them. Throughout the evening, artist and chef Maria Khatchadourian will guide us to collectively prepare food and cook together, reflecting on the tensions between abundance and scarcity that are present during the winter solstice period. Bringing together winter plants and roots, both foraged and cultivated, our collective meal will reflect on the past and future (embodied knowledge) and notions of sustenance in relation to scarcity.

The evening will finish with a screening of Saul Williams’ film Neptune Frost—a transdimensional sci-fi musical set in past-, future- and present-day Rwanda, in the afterlife of the nation’s civil war. An adventure into anti-narrative as Black diasporic treatise, Neptune Frost tells of a generation of dreamers escaping the psycho-social wreckage of colonization, genocide, and the residual brutalities of global extractive industries.

Mariken Heitman studied biology in Utrecht, and currently writes and works as a gardener and teacher of vegetable cultivation. She has published short stories on de Fusie, De Optimist, Papieren Helden, nY, and extra extra magazine. Articles and essays by her have appeared in De Volkskrant, De Standaard and NRC, among others. In 2019, her debut novel De Wateraap was published by Atlas Contact. It was nominated for the Bronzen Uil, the Anton Wachterprijs and was on the longlist for the Jan Wolkersprijs. Her second novel Wormmaan was published in August 2021. Her latest novel De Mierenkaravaan was published in August 2024.

Maria Khatchadourian’s artistic practice takes shape at the intersection of food and art, where inherited recipes, food imaginaries, and communal gestures of eating and cooking together become a gathering ground to unearth notions of exile and loss. Through durational performances, installations, and collaborative dinners she wants to shed light on the politics of care and conflict, of kinship and hardship that shape the landscapes we inhabit.

Get your tickets in our Eventbrite page!

Full programme (Cooking, dinner and screening):
Regular ticket – €12,50
Student ticket – €10,00

Only film screening (from 20:00):
Student discount – €4
Regular ticket – €5

Love, Rob

Join us in commemorating and celebrating the work of Rob Schröder, visionary documentary filmmaker and graphic designer, co-initiator of the activist design collective Wild Plakken, co-founder the Sandberg Instituut, and tutor at Sandberg Design, Shadow Channel and Resolution.

Rob supported and inspired many students bringing together the worlds of filmmaking and design. As former students of Rob we invite you to an informal evening of coming together, watching and discussing two of Rob’s films and remembering Rob, as the caring and supportive tutor he has been.

15.30 Doors open
15.45 Azawad, The Art of Creating a State, Gabrielle Provaas & Rob Schröder, 2015
17.00 Ouwe Hoeren / Meet the Fokkens, Gabrielle Provaas & Rob Schröder, 2011
18.00 Informal after talk with drinks
18.30 Closing

The event will be for free. Donations are welcome. All proceeds will go to Syrian Eyes عيون سورية who support Syrian and Palestinian communities with food, essential products and temporary housing in BEIRUT, TRIPOLI and BEKAA. You can donate here.

Rsvp: design@sandberg.nl

Organised by the Sandberg Instituut in collaboration with W139 and alumni Emirhan Akin, Anja Groten and Juliette Lizotte.

Azawad, The Art of Creating a State, Gabrielle Provaas & Rob Schröder, 2015

Azawad: The Art of Creating a State offers a unique insight into the everyday struggle of the Kel Tamasheq (Tuareg), Arab, Fula, and Songhai peoples that have joined the liberation movement. Together with artist Jonas Staal and researcher Younes Bouadi, the directors interviewed the movement’s provisional government, commanders, strategists, historians, and artists, who explain their endeavors in the “art of creating a state”—a state that, up until today, has not been recognized by any other state in the world.

Ouwe Hoeren / Meet the Fokkens, Gabrielle Provaas & Rob Schröder, 2011

“In the old days, the local copper would tap on the window if a girl was showing too much ankle, now the girls deal coke from their cubicles.” Louise and Martine Fokkens are identical twins. For over 40 years they were working as prostitutes. They freed themselves from the control of their pimps, ran their own brothel, and set up the first informal trade union for prostitutes. They are familiar faces in Amsterdam’s Red Light District, but soon they will bid their farewells.

Meet the Fokkens is a portrait of these remarkable women, as well as a history of the Red Light District over the past fifty years.

Love, Deutschmarks and Death

Love, Deutschmarks and Death is a documentary by director Cem Kaya about the independent, and as of yet, unknown music of emigrated Turkish guest workers and their grandchildren in Germany.

The German Federal Republic’s 1961 recruitment agreement with Turkey not only brought workers, but also their music. The stories of the band Derdiyoklar, Radio Yılmaz, protest rocker Cem Karaca’s German exile, and many more are testament to the unique liveliness of Turkish music in Germany. In a musical and essayistic form, Cem Kaya shares insights into the unique liveliness of this forgotten subculture.

Cem Kaya is a filmmaker that uses extensive found footage and archive material of various kinds in his work. He assembles clips from feature films, commercials, tv documentaries and private footage into witty collages. This colourful mix of material and his own documentary observations are the ingredients for his extremely insightful, sometimes bizarre and often hilarious docu-essays.

Reserve your spot via the Eventbrite page here.
Ticket: € 7,50
Student tickets: € 5,00

Foto’s door Elodie Vreeburg

Museumnacht — Horror: Made in Turkey

Museumnacht at W139 features a moderated talk and screenings where EMIRHAKIN invites artist Elif Satanaya Özbay to explore the evolution of Turkish horror cinema. Deeply engaged with the horror genre both in her artistic practice and as a personal obsession, Özbay joins EMIRHAKIN in a discussion that connects to the broader themes of the exhibition Remarkable Meetings with Disgusting Men and beyond.

Focusing on the transformation of the Turkish horror genre over the past two decades—from attempts to emulate Hollywood to a distinct emphasis on Quranic symbolism—the conversation will examine how these changes reflect the political and societal shifts within Turkey. The artists will trace these transformations through their personal memories, connecting them to the collective memory of Turkey and its diasporas. By screening excerpts from iconic Turkish horror films, the talk aims to performatively investigate how this genre has been repurposed to serve contemporary Turkish political narratives over the past twenty years.

The night will close with a DJ set by SIGA, who will take us on a worldwide journey through the night, where he will stimulate feelings of celebration and grieve at the same time. Genres: Ambient, Fourth World, Psychedelic Turkish Jazz, Arabic stuff, Teenage Rage, TikTok hits, and more.

If you have a Museumnacht ticket and would like to attend the conversation with Elif Satanaya Özbay and EMIRHAKIN, please RSVP here. Kindly note that the event can only be accessed with a Museumnacht ticket

Tickets are available via the website of Museumnacht.

19:00 Doors open
19:30-21:00 Conversation Elif Satanaya Özbay and EMIRHAKIN
21:30-01:30 DJ set SIGA
02:00 Doors close

Elif Satanaya Özbay is an Amsterdam-based artist whose multidisciplinary practice spans performances, installations, and essays. With a background in film, she draws from her Turkish-Circassian heritage and horror cinema to investigate narrative construction through montage, collage, and scenographic interventions. Özbay’s work reconfigures personal history, folklore, and pop culture, blending the familiar with the uncanny to explore the role of the unreliable narrator. Her layered, immersive works challenge conventional storytelling, creating speculative spaces that question cultural and historical narratives. Through this, she navigates the intersections of memory, myth, and materiality, crafting new meanings from recontextualized objects and stories.

EMIRHAKIN poses urgent yet open questions about the influence of contemporary politics on our human psyche. Navigating through the ever-changing signs and symbols of our times, the artist is mainly curious about the things that are being put in places that they are not supposed to be, serving as reminders that meaning often emerges through this arbitrariness. His practice encompasses the mediums of performance, text, video, and installation, which are translated into visual (and non-visual) indexes. By challenging the bodily experience of the artist and the audience, his long-durational pieces dismantle the predefined ways of observing and performing, consider the space beyond physicality as a negotiation, and resist the constructed idea of time through the modes of queer temporalities.

SIGA will take us on a worldwide journey through the night, where he will stimulate feelings of celebration and grieve at the same time. Expect to stare and browse into your own soul, or maybe Shazam some tunes every now and then. One thing is for sure, you’ll at least have a little dance before the end of the night, because if we don’t dance for our triumphs, who will? Genres: Ambient, Fourth World, Psychedelic Turkish Jazz, Arabic stuff, Teenage Rage, TikTok hits, and more.

Images by Elodie Vreeburg

Citizen’s Circle

Meenakshi Thirukode invites you to Citizen’s Circle, a public gathering, workshop, and collective dialogue in which Meenakshi invites participants to contemplate on ideas of citizenship and democracy. How does solidarity and allyship operate in times like these? What does it mean to participate in a democracy? This circle will prompt reflection on embracing discomfort, of sitting across from a fellow human, fostering a moment where we can talk, hold space for each other, and listen.

TIME calls this “The Ultimate Election Year’ with 64 countries (plus the European Union) going to the polls globally. That’s 49% of the combined population whose votes—amidst the backdrop of many resistance movements—will set the course of what democracy will look like in the future. Meenakshi is interested in the interconnectedness of the struggle for liberation, whether it’s combatting sexual violence or eradicating settler colonialism. How do these issues intertwine? Rooted in the idea of politics of love in India, this workshop recognizes that our freedoms are inseparable from one another, and that we must learn from each other’s perspectives in the pursuit for a better world.

Citizen’s Circle will include a brief discussion of the video work titled The Great Intangible: for the love of a politics of love (in two parts), which is being screened as a part of Outside the Soup. Please join us on Saturday 6 July for this special gathering!

This workshop is part of Outside the Soup, a group exhibition that emphasizes the potential of art to create new worldviews through radical imagination and artistic experimentation; placing care, solidarity, and trust at the forefront.

Citizen’s Circle is organized in collaboration with Kunstinstituut Melly and is supported by The Polis Project. The visit of Meenakshi Thirukode is made possible by the International Visitors Programme of the Nieuwe Instituut with support from the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Tickets are available via the Eventbrite page for the event.

Visual identity by Sheona Turnbull.