Roodkapje is Rotterdam’s local laboratory for
ART X MUSIC X FOOD and everything in between

Delftseplein 39
3013 AA Rotterdam

Visit exhibition
Tue-Sat 12:00 – 17:00

Roodkapje is Rotterdam's local laboratory for
ART X LIVE X FOOD and everything in between

25 April 2024

How to continue self-organization? [workshops]

A day of workshops on self-organized and collective practices led by:
Doe Het Zelf Werkplaats
Non Native Native & Soupspoon Collective
KraakSpreekuur Rotterdam
Papaya Kuir

& additional presentations by Femke Dekker (Loma Doom), WdKA students and Dirar Kalash, followed by a gentrification bike tour after the event, at 18.00.

This event is all about spaces and communities that artists, activists, and other people create together.
It's the third in a series (the last ones were in 2017 and 2019), and this time we're focusing on how things have changed.
Since the pandemic, exploding housing costs, and multiple crises, it's become harder to run self-organized communities. But perhaps, they are more important now than ever before.
This event connects to Roodkapje's "So Happy Together" series about collective communities. We'll ask questions like: How can we work together in difficult times? How can we make things fair? How to deal with power and privilege? What have been oversights and mistakes in the past?

The day will consist of workshops, where you can explore these issues with artists through activities like making zines and exploring the city.
At the end, we'll put our ideas together in a collective map.

This event is organized by Roodkapje and the Autonomy Lab research group of the Willem de Kooning Academy. Hogeschool Rotterdam, made possible by the kind support of Pictoright Fonds. All funding goes to the artists and the event.


WORKSHOPS (please choose one of the four, and register for it):

1.) NON NATIVE NATIVE x SOUPSPOON

Both Non Native Native and Soupspoon are interested in the space created by self-organizing, yet diving into collective practice requires a constant juggle of commitments and learning. Whether functioning as a platform or an artist collective, the ongoing reflection of "why and how we come together" is a shared meeting point, that intertwines with friendship, joy, and care, as well as the struggles and limitations of an individualist society not yet knowing how or wanting to deal with collectives.
In this workshop, we want to make space for the hovering “why and how” questions that permeate our lives, approaching them with playfulness and honesty.


About NON NATIVE NATIVE x SOUPSPOON:
- NON NATIVE NATIVE (NNN) is a cultural platform which looks into the Asian creative landscape in The Netherlands through the lens of the outsiders from within. The platform serves as an alternative point of exchange for critical creative practitioners between the Asian and Dutch cultural landscape with the focus on contemporary visual culture.

- SOUPSPOON Collective was formed in Rotterdam, Summer 2022 by Raffia Li (CN), Maoyi Qiu (CN), Miyoung Chang (KR), Dakota Guo (CN) and Pitchaya Ngamcharoen (TH). Attempting to cultivate a common, Asian contextualized space for the particularities that elude translation, it aims to convene a generative forum of “minor gestures” and “micro politics.”


2.) A practical squatting role playing game
by KraakSpreekUur 010.

Squatting guides and speaking hours often neglect the social dynamics between members in the squatting group and the weird encounters and situations that happen around squatting. To give a better understanding of squatting we are doing a role playing game.
Expect: collectively planning an action, breaking in and trying to manouver the landscape of owners, cops, and neigbours that make up the city based on real stories of squatting in rotterdam.


KraakSpreekUur 010 (Squatting information hour Rotterdam) will help you to realise your wildest squatting dreams. If you look around the city you’ll see many empty vacancies. They could be yours! We’ll help you think of ways to break and enter through loopholes in the law. We are NOT an anti-squat corporation. We are NOT a corporation or secret society. We MIGHT be ANTIFA. But really we are just a bunch of freaks who like to have a roof over our heads. And if we can’t have it, then we’re taking it.


**3.) Nombre del taller: In-Trans-Sect-I-ONS***
by Papaya Kuir

Papaya Kuir will introduce their work as a collective, followed by discussions and creative exercises on collective organising and implementing change. Working from the question; what can we do to make things better, while feeling powerless in an unsustainable system that doesn't have our best interest on their agenda?


Papaya Kuir is a lesbo-transfeminist collective created by and for Latin American migrants and refugees residing in the Netherlands and the larger community interested in our struggle. Our work pillars are: advocacy, emergency support, community building.


4.) Let’s Get Down to the Nuts and Bolts
by Doe-Het-Zelf Werkplaats

Our workshop will host a hang-out space for participants to join us in discussing urgent questions about self-organization, all the while sorting through our containers of misplaced nuts and bolts that have been sorely unattended to.

As a continually shifting collective of persons with widely overlapping and differing interests, the time and space to discuss ‘who and what are we here for’ can become elusive, let alone a common set of practices or values. There are however, things that bind us, and the space, to sustain as an autonomous and active place for over 15 years. We want to take this time to share these tensions/questions as a common issue that we can collectively approach.

We ask, “How does the Doe-Het-Zelf Werkplaats relate to the neighborhood and act as a force of anti-gentrification?”, along three interrelated topics:
(a) sustaining values over the transition of volunteers and the growth of the space (b) organizational practices and shared approaches, including money (c) communication and inclusivity towards newly interested users, visitors, and volunteers.

Each of the topics will be spurred by two different DHZ folks, broken up with brain breaks, and concluding with a fun musical chairs ‘panel’ :p

The ‘Doe-Het-Zelf Werkplaats’ is a free-to-use, collectively run workshop space and community garden in Rotterdam Noord operated by volunteers. Visitors to the workshop come to fix their own bikes with tools and spare parts that have been donated. Centered around Learning Together and anti-judgement, previous
knowledge of bikes or tools are not at all necessary and the volunteers are always there to work together with visitors; building new relations by sharing in problem solving, reciprocal generosity and mutual empowerment.

12:00 - welcome & introduction
13.00-16.00 - workshops; choose one of four!
16.00-17.00 - collective wrap-up
17.00-17.40 - listening to Dirar Kalash's audio piece "underneath the rubble my hand became a will"
17.40-18.00 time together

18.00 gentrification bike tour to ex-squats in Rotterdam, led by Doe Het Zelf Werkplaats (open to everyone, including people who didn't attend the day program)