Roodkapje is Rotterdam's local laboratory for
ART X LIVE X FOOD and everything in between
2 August 2024 - 4 August 2024
Art, Life, Anarchive
Art, Life, Anarchive : a summer school for the hangry
food for thought, action and imagination
Roodkapje and the Hamburger Community welcome you to a summer school weekender filled with talks, conversations, a listening session, performances, video work and workshops on storytelling in the cracks of archives, speculative immersive theatre and Happening making. This year, Happenings and the anarchive are the red threads in Roodkapje’s art and residency program. Here at Roodkapje, we are reshaping and reimagining what these concepts can mean, be or do. During Art, Life, Anarchive we will invite other artists, activists, cultural workers and researchers to deepen our understanding of existing practices, histories and mentalities and get inspired for possible future action.
We want to break the binary between art and life and do away with Art-as-we-know-it; the kind of Art that the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination identifies as a weapon of colonialism and capitalism, the kind of Art that serves Business-as-usual. We want to learn about the creative tools and tactics that can fuel political action and cultivate what bring joy and nourishment to our daily lives. In the cracks of this system, we’ll look for ways to survive and bloom, meanwhile making the cracks bigger and bigger, so that some day, trees can grow from them.
At this summer school, we will look at archives and examine the ways we are documenting our activities. We consider the anarchive as a way to break free from the Archive-as-we-know-it. In doing so, we celebrate subjectivity and refuse to claim authority over the past. We want to expore how the anarchive can make space for reciprocity in collective memory and meaning making. With artist and researcher Carine Zaayman we wonder: how does one document the full sensorial experience of lived life and pay attention to the silences left?
How do we go about this? How do we become Thaumaturges; these workers of wonder that embrace magic and ritual? What are imaginations of the otherwise, what could be, as feminist writer Lola Olufemi urges us to ask? And how will we hone our crafts to make the otherwise happen in the here and now?
—
This summer school is organized by Roodkapje’s anarchivist Wan Ing Que and the Hamburger Community residents Julia Wilhelm, Repelsteeltje, M.C. Julie Yu, Tisa World and Irene Cassarini.
We are excited to welcome and learn from the following guests:
the Book Bloc Brigade, Jay Jordan (Laboratory for Insurrectionary Imagination, Majazz Project, Manique Hendricks, Senka Milutinović, Juha van 't Zelfde, Carine Zaayman and Svetlana Romanova
Program
Friday 2 August
20:00 - 23:00
Palestinian Sound Archive
talk and listening session
by Mo’min Swaitat from the Majazz Project
Palestinian Sound Archive is a celebration of music, spoken word and album artwork from historic Palestine, mainly from the 1960s-1990s. It is part of Majazz Project, a Palestinian-led record label and research platform founded by actor, director and filmmaker Mo’min Swaitat in 2020. Over several years, Mo’min amassed an extensive archive of cassettes and vinyl records from Palestine and beyond, spanning everything from field recordings of Bedouin weddings to revolutionary albums from the First and Second Intifadas, instrumental tracks, poetry, soul, folk songs and jazz. Many of these were acquired from a former record label in Mo’min’s hometown Jenin, in the north of the West Bank. Palestinian Sound Archive was borne out of the archive and is focused on sampling, remixing and reissuing vintage Palestinian and Arab albums, shedding new light on the richness and diversity of Palestinian / Arab cultural and musical heritage.
Mo’min comes from a long line of Bedouin musicians and storytellers, and the archive references his rootedness in music as a means of celebrating one’s culture and sense of belonging. He plays everything from jazz to funk, soul to dabke, field recordings to spoken word, folk to electronic music from Palestine, the broader region and across the Global South.
---
Book Bloc Training
choreographed tacital trianing & dynamic reading performance
by the Book Bloc Brigade
The Book Bloc shields have been painted and built during several sweatshops, of which one took place at Roodkapje in the beginning of July. The shields are meant to protect and embolden our comrades in their struggle against the cops for a Free Palestine by shielding their bodies and nourishing our minds. During this short and participatory training, we will activate the shields by creating figures and defensive formations responding to the surrounding architecture. All the while passing on the megaphone to share quotes from the books that substantiate our knowledge and invigorate our struggle, using our voices as vessels of solidarity. Will we be able to defend our comrades from fake cops?
Join us in this reclaiming of public space that blurs the lines between participatory performance, practical training, and public action.
The Book Bloc Brigade is the walking bibliography that protects protesters from nasty cops in riot gear, acting tough but full of fear. We choose to defend ourselves with books, because they give us reasons to revolt and resolve to resist! Book bloc traces its genealogy to the student movement against budget cuts in education in Italy in 2010.
Saturday 3 August
afternoon
13:00 - 18:00
Archival Crevices
workshop
by Senka Milutinović
This workshop will include reading, writing, forgetting and fictioning in the places of gaps, and omissions in archives. Fictioning, critical fabulation, and conversational footnotes will be tools we will use to seep through the archival crevices and write an alternative past and future. Archives here are understood in a broad way, and include more unruly, unclassified, unreliable notions of archiving that might not be considered ‘professional’.
Senka Milutinović was born in 1999 in Belgrade, Serbia and is a researcher, writer, and multimedia designer based in Rotterdam, the Netherland. They’re obsessed with alternative archival practices and queer histories.
Viva Absence! Anarchives of the relegated
presentation & conversation
with Carine Zaayman
In this presentation and conversation, Zaayman shall reflect on how she came to the idea of the anarchive, a constellation of archive in which absence is centered. She will reflect on her frustrations with colonial record-making and suggest in its stead other forms of knowledge work made possible by anarchival thinking and practices. She hopes to explore some of these practices in conversation with the audience. What would it mean to be fully attentive to the full sensorial and inter-subjective realities of being present, and what kinds of custodianship of the past might we envisage from such a perspective?
Carine Zaayman is an artist, curator and scholar committed to critical engagement with colonial archives and collections, specifically those holding strands of Khoekhoe pasts. As a descendant of Krotoa, her research focuses in particular on the afterlives of slavery and colonialism in the Cape, as well as the network of spaces caught in the wake of Dutch colonial occupation. Through her work, she aims to bring intangible and neglected histories into view and to contribute to a radical reconsideration of colonial archives and museum collections. In this way, she seeks ways to release the hold these institutes have maintained over our imaginations as we narrate the past, and also how we might envision futures from it.
Zaayman works as a researcher and research coordinator at the Research Center for Material Culture at the Wereldmuseum in the Netherlands. She further collaborates on projects that narrate the colonial history of the Cape from the perspectives of Indigenous and enslaved people and their descendants, including the Cape X Utrecht exhibition (2023), as well as the ongoing Under Cover of Darkness project.
Saturday 3 August
evening
20:00 - 22:30
Act ‘as if’ it’s happening now, the ‘revolution‘ I mean:
a handful of stories, about trying to break toxic binaries
with Jay Jordan
Come hear stories about Jay Jordan’s long and often bumpy journey towards magic and a world that attempts to dissolves toxic binaries, especially between reality and fiction. Jay is labeled a "Domestic Extremist" by the police, and “a magician of rebellion” by the press. Part-time author, witch, sex worker and full time trouble maker, they are a lover of edges, especially between art and activism.
Fascinated by rituals and carnivals from a young age, they always wanted to break the binary between audience and artist, to smash the toxic spell of the spectacle. For a while as a young artist they found solace in happenings and performance art but they soon realised that these practices were still part of the toxic binary that detached art from everyday life and especially from effective socio/political transformation. Merging direct action and art, from the 90’s to 2020’s, especially with their collective the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination (co-facilitated with Isabelle Fremeaux) they found a space where many of these binaries were dissolved.
Following a classic activist burn out in 2017, they returned to the roots of their work, ritual and magic. Rituals are the ancestors of all art, a biotechnology of transformation and connection. Yet the contemporary art world often promotes individualistic, detached and hypermobile lifestyles, where the creative gesture has no real roots in a community or territory. In 2012, Jay deserted the metropolis to live on the ZAD of Notre-Dame-des-Landes, to fight against an international airport project. There they co-founded the Cellule d’Action Rituelle with the duo -h-, to design rituals, in an attempt to bring culture back to the etymological roots of cul-terra, ‘taking care of the earth’.
Sunday 4 August
12:30 - 19:00
Play, or, The Inner Experience of Emergence
workshop
with Orion Maxted
In this session, we shall play. Play, play, play. Children's games, playground games, language games, wild games, games for the sake of games. Play for remembering how to play, for the pure necessity of it, for speed, giddiness and falling-over fun. For the sake of being together, of community, of much-needed transcendence, of getting out of your own skin and being something more than oneself for a while.
Through this exploration, we will reintroduce this seemingly frivolous and childlike pursuit to Roodkapje and the Anarchive.
We may also enquire into play's shared homological relationship with the systems perspective, and the self-organising structures found in nature and the cosmos at large. How play might deepen our appreciation of complexity and interdependence of ecological and cultural systems? How might play serve as a basis for collective being, doing, and living? How might play inspire collective action? How can it re-enchant the world with a sense of liveliness that motivates learning and action that supports the flourishing of systems? How might 'just' playing soften the rigidity of our normative world with an openness to the way things could be? Or we might ‘just’ play.
Orion Maxted is a performance artist, cybernetic theatre maker, and curator of collective intelligences. At the Center Leo Apostel for Transdisciplinary Studies, VUB, Brussels, Orion co-runs the Artscience Department and co-curates both the Systems At Play programme and The Imaginary Institute. His research explores the intersection of collective theatre practice, play, and systems thinking.
–
Collective Creativity & Club Culture
presentation and conversation
with Manique Hendricks and Juha van ‘t Zelfde
The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible
- Toni Cade Bambara
We need queer nightlife because it teaches us to be nimble thinkers, moving with bodies, history, money, and aesthetics. We need this world because it archives politics (elsewhere undocumented) through gesture, memory, DJing techniques, promotional fliers, architecture. We need this world because, as the root and incubator of other kinds of politics and culture that feel more mainstream, urgent, serious, or researchable, it tells a fuller story.
- from the book Queer Night Life
How do you archive and exhibit club culture? Club culture is ephemeral, flyers and posters often don’t have year dates marked on them. The club experience is intangible and cannot be captured in one single object or material. This is where personal stories and artists become important to bring the artifacts to life again.
Collective creativity stands for equal collaboration and a club night is the perfect example of this. Various elements come together: from the music, to performances, decor, dressed up partygoers, to the architecture of the building and the design of the promotional material. Everyone contributes equally to a collective body of work, imagining a new world together which holds revolutionary potential. Collective creativity is essential to club culture where artistic expression has its own set of rules. When the right conditions are met, magic happens.
How can artists make use of archival materials to make revolution irresistible?
What new forms of collective expression are needed for solidarity, community and revolution?
Manique Hendricks is a Dutch-Peranakan Chinese art historian. She works as contemporary art curator at the Frans Hals Museum. In her work she specializes in contemporary (media) art, visual and digital culture, exploring and highlighting themes around identity, representation, the body, drag and club culture.
Juha van ‘t Zelfde is a Finnish-Dutch artist, educator and organiser living in Amsterdam-Noord. In his work he explores the revolutionary potential of collective creativity. As an autodidact DJ, filmmaker and anarchist, clubs are his art school and protests his phd.
The two met during the making of (and while collaborating on) the archival exhibition ‘To Dance is to be Free: Club Culture in Amsterdam from 1980 until now’ at the Amsterdam City Archives in 2023. Van ‘t Zelfde’s video installation RoXY (2022) formed an essential part in the exhibition, weaving together club culture, protest movements, activism, youth culture and art history.
music, food and drinks
DJ set by LARASATI
Ticket info
Weekend Ticket a €30,- incl Saturday dinner and Sunday dinner
Friday ticket a €7,50
Saturday ticket a €15,- incl. dinner
Saturday afternoon a €8,50
Saturday evening a €8,50
Sunday ticket a €12,- incl dinner
The poster design is a collab between Jeanine van Berkel (house style designer for the Hamburger Community) and Iris van Velzen (house style designer for het anarchief)
This program is supported by the Mondriaan Fund, Stimuleringsfonds voor de Creatieve Industrie en Gemeente Rotterdam
food for thought, action and imagination
Roodkapje and the Hamburger Community welcome you to a summer school weekender filled with talks, conversations, a listening session, performances, video work and workshops on storytelling in the cracks of archives, speculative immersive theatre and Happening making. This year, Happenings and the anarchive are the red threads in Roodkapje’s art and residency program. Here at Roodkapje, we are reshaping and reimagining what these concepts can mean, be or do. During Art, Life, Anarchive we will invite other artists, activists, cultural workers and researchers to deepen our understanding of existing practices, histories and mentalities and get inspired for possible future action.
We want to break the binary between art and life and do away with Art-as-we-know-it; the kind of Art that the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination identifies as a weapon of colonialism and capitalism, the kind of Art that serves Business-as-usual. We want to learn about the creative tools and tactics that can fuel political action and cultivate what bring joy and nourishment to our daily lives. In the cracks of this system, we’ll look for ways to survive and bloom, meanwhile making the cracks bigger and bigger, so that some day, trees can grow from them.
At this summer school, we will look at archives and examine the ways we are documenting our activities. We consider the anarchive as a way to break free from the Archive-as-we-know-it. In doing so, we celebrate subjectivity and refuse to claim authority over the past. We want to expore how the anarchive can make space for reciprocity in collective memory and meaning making. With artist and researcher Carine Zaayman we wonder: how does one document the full sensorial experience of lived life and pay attention to the silences left?
How do we go about this? How do we become Thaumaturges; these workers of wonder that embrace magic and ritual? What are imaginations of the otherwise, what could be, as feminist writer Lola Olufemi urges us to ask? And how will we hone our crafts to make the otherwise happen in the here and now?
—
This summer school is organized by Roodkapje’s anarchivist Wan Ing Que and the Hamburger Community residents Julia Wilhelm, Repelsteeltje, M.C. Julie Yu, Tisa World and Irene Cassarini.
We are excited to welcome and learn from the following guests:
the Book Bloc Brigade, Jay Jordan (Laboratory for Insurrectionary Imagination, Majazz Project, Manique Hendricks, Senka Milutinović, Juha van 't Zelfde, Carine Zaayman and Svetlana Romanova
Program
Friday 2 August
20:00 - 23:00
Palestinian Sound Archive
talk and listening session
by Mo’min Swaitat from the Majazz Project
Palestinian Sound Archive is a celebration of music, spoken word and album artwork from historic Palestine, mainly from the 1960s-1990s. It is part of Majazz Project, a Palestinian-led record label and research platform founded by actor, director and filmmaker Mo’min Swaitat in 2020. Over several years, Mo’min amassed an extensive archive of cassettes and vinyl records from Palestine and beyond, spanning everything from field recordings of Bedouin weddings to revolutionary albums from the First and Second Intifadas, instrumental tracks, poetry, soul, folk songs and jazz. Many of these were acquired from a former record label in Mo’min’s hometown Jenin, in the north of the West Bank. Palestinian Sound Archive was borne out of the archive and is focused on sampling, remixing and reissuing vintage Palestinian and Arab albums, shedding new light on the richness and diversity of Palestinian / Arab cultural and musical heritage.
Mo’min comes from a long line of Bedouin musicians and storytellers, and the archive references his rootedness in music as a means of celebrating one’s culture and sense of belonging. He plays everything from jazz to funk, soul to dabke, field recordings to spoken word, folk to electronic music from Palestine, the broader region and across the Global South.
---
Book Bloc Training
choreographed tacital trianing & dynamic reading performance
by the Book Bloc Brigade
The Book Bloc shields have been painted and built during several sweatshops, of which one took place at Roodkapje in the beginning of July. The shields are meant to protect and embolden our comrades in their struggle against the cops for a Free Palestine by shielding their bodies and nourishing our minds. During this short and participatory training, we will activate the shields by creating figures and defensive formations responding to the surrounding architecture. All the while passing on the megaphone to share quotes from the books that substantiate our knowledge and invigorate our struggle, using our voices as vessels of solidarity. Will we be able to defend our comrades from fake cops?
Join us in this reclaiming of public space that blurs the lines between participatory performance, practical training, and public action.
The Book Bloc Brigade is the walking bibliography that protects protesters from nasty cops in riot gear, acting tough but full of fear. We choose to defend ourselves with books, because they give us reasons to revolt and resolve to resist! Book bloc traces its genealogy to the student movement against budget cuts in education in Italy in 2010.
Saturday 3 August
afternoon
13:00 - 18:00
Archival Crevices
workshop
by Senka Milutinović
This workshop will include reading, writing, forgetting and fictioning in the places of gaps, and omissions in archives. Fictioning, critical fabulation, and conversational footnotes will be tools we will use to seep through the archival crevices and write an alternative past and future. Archives here are understood in a broad way, and include more unruly, unclassified, unreliable notions of archiving that might not be considered ‘professional’.
Senka Milutinović was born in 1999 in Belgrade, Serbia and is a researcher, writer, and multimedia designer based in Rotterdam, the Netherland. They’re obsessed with alternative archival practices and queer histories.
Viva Absence! Anarchives of the relegated
presentation & conversation
with Carine Zaayman
In this presentation and conversation, Zaayman shall reflect on how she came to the idea of the anarchive, a constellation of archive in which absence is centered. She will reflect on her frustrations with colonial record-making and suggest in its stead other forms of knowledge work made possible by anarchival thinking and practices. She hopes to explore some of these practices in conversation with the audience. What would it mean to be fully attentive to the full sensorial and inter-subjective realities of being present, and what kinds of custodianship of the past might we envisage from such a perspective?
Carine Zaayman is an artist, curator and scholar committed to critical engagement with colonial archives and collections, specifically those holding strands of Khoekhoe pasts. As a descendant of Krotoa, her research focuses in particular on the afterlives of slavery and colonialism in the Cape, as well as the network of spaces caught in the wake of Dutch colonial occupation. Through her work, she aims to bring intangible and neglected histories into view and to contribute to a radical reconsideration of colonial archives and museum collections. In this way, she seeks ways to release the hold these institutes have maintained over our imaginations as we narrate the past, and also how we might envision futures from it.
Zaayman works as a researcher and research coordinator at the Research Center for Material Culture at the Wereldmuseum in the Netherlands. She further collaborates on projects that narrate the colonial history of the Cape from the perspectives of Indigenous and enslaved people and their descendants, including the Cape X Utrecht exhibition (2023), as well as the ongoing Under Cover of Darkness project.
Saturday 3 August
evening
20:00 - 22:30
Act ‘as if’ it’s happening now, the ‘revolution‘ I mean:
a handful of stories, about trying to break toxic binaries
with Jay Jordan
Come hear stories about Jay Jordan’s long and often bumpy journey towards magic and a world that attempts to dissolves toxic binaries, especially between reality and fiction. Jay is labeled a "Domestic Extremist" by the police, and “a magician of rebellion” by the press. Part-time author, witch, sex worker and full time trouble maker, they are a lover of edges, especially between art and activism.
Fascinated by rituals and carnivals from a young age, they always wanted to break the binary between audience and artist, to smash the toxic spell of the spectacle. For a while as a young artist they found solace in happenings and performance art but they soon realised that these practices were still part of the toxic binary that detached art from everyday life and especially from effective socio/political transformation. Merging direct action and art, from the 90’s to 2020’s, especially with their collective the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination (co-facilitated with Isabelle Fremeaux) they found a space where many of these binaries were dissolved.
Following a classic activist burn out in 2017, they returned to the roots of their work, ritual and magic. Rituals are the ancestors of all art, a biotechnology of transformation and connection. Yet the contemporary art world often promotes individualistic, detached and hypermobile lifestyles, where the creative gesture has no real roots in a community or territory. In 2012, Jay deserted the metropolis to live on the ZAD of Notre-Dame-des-Landes, to fight against an international airport project. There they co-founded the Cellule d’Action Rituelle with the duo -h-, to design rituals, in an attempt to bring culture back to the etymological roots of cul-terra, ‘taking care of the earth’.
Sunday 4 August
12:30 - 19:00
Play, or, The Inner Experience of Emergence
workshop
with Orion Maxted
In this session, we shall play. Play, play, play. Children's games, playground games, language games, wild games, games for the sake of games. Play for remembering how to play, for the pure necessity of it, for speed, giddiness and falling-over fun. For the sake of being together, of community, of much-needed transcendence, of getting out of your own skin and being something more than oneself for a while.
Through this exploration, we will reintroduce this seemingly frivolous and childlike pursuit to Roodkapje and the Anarchive.
We may also enquire into play's shared homological relationship with the systems perspective, and the self-organising structures found in nature and the cosmos at large. How play might deepen our appreciation of complexity and interdependence of ecological and cultural systems? How might play serve as a basis for collective being, doing, and living? How might play inspire collective action? How can it re-enchant the world with a sense of liveliness that motivates learning and action that supports the flourishing of systems? How might 'just' playing soften the rigidity of our normative world with an openness to the way things could be? Or we might ‘just’ play.
Orion Maxted is a performance artist, cybernetic theatre maker, and curator of collective intelligences. At the Center Leo Apostel for Transdisciplinary Studies, VUB, Brussels, Orion co-runs the Artscience Department and co-curates both the Systems At Play programme and The Imaginary Institute. His research explores the intersection of collective theatre practice, play, and systems thinking.
–
Collective Creativity & Club Culture
presentation and conversation
with Manique Hendricks and Juha van ‘t Zelfde
The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible
- Toni Cade Bambara
We need queer nightlife because it teaches us to be nimble thinkers, moving with bodies, history, money, and aesthetics. We need this world because it archives politics (elsewhere undocumented) through gesture, memory, DJing techniques, promotional fliers, architecture. We need this world because, as the root and incubator of other kinds of politics and culture that feel more mainstream, urgent, serious, or researchable, it tells a fuller story.
- from the book Queer Night Life
How do you archive and exhibit club culture? Club culture is ephemeral, flyers and posters often don’t have year dates marked on them. The club experience is intangible and cannot be captured in one single object or material. This is where personal stories and artists become important to bring the artifacts to life again.
Collective creativity stands for equal collaboration and a club night is the perfect example of this. Various elements come together: from the music, to performances, decor, dressed up partygoers, to the architecture of the building and the design of the promotional material. Everyone contributes equally to a collective body of work, imagining a new world together which holds revolutionary potential. Collective creativity is essential to club culture where artistic expression has its own set of rules. When the right conditions are met, magic happens.
How can artists make use of archival materials to make revolution irresistible?
What new forms of collective expression are needed for solidarity, community and revolution?
Manique Hendricks is a Dutch-Peranakan Chinese art historian. She works as contemporary art curator at the Frans Hals Museum. In her work she specializes in contemporary (media) art, visual and digital culture, exploring and highlighting themes around identity, representation, the body, drag and club culture.
Juha van ‘t Zelfde is a Finnish-Dutch artist, educator and organiser living in Amsterdam-Noord. In his work he explores the revolutionary potential of collective creativity. As an autodidact DJ, filmmaker and anarchist, clubs are his art school and protests his phd.
The two met during the making of (and while collaborating on) the archival exhibition ‘To Dance is to be Free: Club Culture in Amsterdam from 1980 until now’ at the Amsterdam City Archives in 2023. Van ‘t Zelfde’s video installation RoXY (2022) formed an essential part in the exhibition, weaving together club culture, protest movements, activism, youth culture and art history.
music, food and drinks
DJ set by LARASATI
Ticket info
Weekend Ticket a €30,- incl Saturday dinner and Sunday dinner
Friday ticket a €7,50
Saturday ticket a €15,- incl. dinner
Saturday afternoon a €8,50
Saturday evening a €8,50
Sunday ticket a €12,- incl dinner
The poster design is a collab between Jeanine van Berkel (house style designer for the Hamburger Community) and Iris van Velzen (house style designer for het anarchief)
This program is supported by the Mondriaan Fund, Stimuleringsfonds voor de Creatieve Industrie en Gemeente Rotterdam
