Roodkapje is Rotterdam's local laboratory for
ART X LIVE X FOOD and everything in between
Our art program is dynamic, riotous and multi-voiced at heart. The collective experiments by the Hamburger Community residents make this heart beat.
Roodkapje’s Hamburger Community residency program is a 10-month interdisciplinary art laboratory for collaborative practice, collective fun and direct interaction between artists and audience. The trajectory’s main focus is playfulness and creating together. Residents of the Hamburger Community inhabit a shared studio workspace to which they have 24/7 access and follow a program of guidance and mentorships.
Residents are chosen through a yearly Open Call, often published just before Summer. If you would like to get more information about this residency please contact love@roodkapje.org
Hamburger Community 2024
The members of this year’s residency are:
Irene Cassarini, Julia Wilhelm, M.C. Julie Yu, Repelsteeltje and Tisa World
Picture the new residents as plants of different sizes, shapes, and needs, all uprooted from their native ecosystems, repotted into the fertile soil of the Hamburger Community greenhouse. Which shape will their symbiotic co-existence take? How to improve the conditions for them to bloom? How will they change with the seasons? Over the coming year, they plan on growing a resilient network of roots that distributes nutrients beyond the walls of the cultural greenhouse. Their imagination will germinate speculative realities, seed encounters for (un)learning, sprout fertile actions in public space, and cross-pollinate amongst their communities.
Hamburger Community residency
(genealogy)
In 2019, Roodkapje introduced its artist-in-residency programs dubbed the Hamburger Community of Art & Live. Since then 26 artists have been developing and showing their work, both in solo exhibitions and working collaboratively with mentors such as Mette Sterre, Nora Turato, Rory Pilgrim and Alexandra Philips.
In 2023, the former two artist residencies Hamburger Community of Art & Live merged into one program Hamburger Community – Test Site. Interdisciplinary collaboration with each other and the public is its core. During a year of research with artist and researchers Katinka de Jonge and Simon Kentgens, Roodkapje learned more about collective artistic exchange and experimented with different forms of meeting, exchanging, plotting and colluding. This fed into the open call for the Hamburger Community this year, setting it up for a year of collaborative experiment between residents, team and public.
Public program
The Hamburger Community organizes eight Happenings, in collaboration with each other, each other’s collectives, friends, comrades and mentors. During these public moments, anything can happen: it could be a workshop, a performance, a jam, printing or reading session, a concert or an exhibition. They are encouraged to experiment and try out ideas directly with the public and engage with different audiences. These Happenings will in turn inspire fellow artists who will work with their traces and develop pieces for the Anarchive. Roodkapje starts their Anarchive in May, 2024 working together with makers outside of the Hamburger Community, transforming the spirit of the Happenings into suggestions for new beginnings, relations and ways of being.
The public program is initiated and organized from A-Z by the members themselves with guidance from Roodkapje’s team in production, communication and conceptual development.
Current residents
The members of this year’s residency are:
Tisa World, Repelsteeltje, Julia Wilhelm, M.C. Julie Yu and Irene Cassarini
M.C. Julie Yu is an interdisciplinary artist, freelance masseur, and novice activist who is currently based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Her works include a wide variety of media, such as video, music, print, exercise, performance, workshops, and installation. Julie’s artistic practices revolve around the senses of othering under the postcolonial and capitalist cultural phenomena, specifically based on the experience as a migrant and interdisciplinary worker. She reflects on these experiences through various sub-culture inspirations and addresses the reflection with a good dose of humor.
For her time at Roodkapje, she has some ideas about magic, body repair, rituals and alternative healing methods. It may turn into a pop-up wellness center or become a long journey on interviews. Expect some passive and cynical thoughts, never-conquered culture shocks, and sprinkles of fears and frustration toward life in general… all crappily packed under her dry smile.
Julia Wilhelm
Julia Wilhelm is an artist and organiser based in Rotterdam. She is passionate about building bottom-up infrastructures, developing formats for learning together, and experimenting with alternative tools for the creation and dissemination of knowledges. In her practice she uses workshops as participatory spaces for exchange and experimentation. Paper and radio waves feature as intimate carriers of ideas, dreams, knowledges, and questions. She loves writing and reading and believes in the urgency of working collectively to experiment with alternative forms of social organizing towards communal agency and responsibility.
In Roodkapje she wants to experiment with visionary fiction as a means to stimulate collective imagination and devise tools for participatory storytelling and imagining. She also looks to reimagine what the Happening could be and to organize in collaboration with her collectives SPIN and Reading Rhythms Club.
Irene Cassarini also known as Guenter Råler is a music producer, DJ, multimedia artist and curator from Italy, now based in The Netherlands. Their immersive work takes shape at the intersection of sonic exploration and visual storytelling. Active in the local nightlife, Irene runs several queer and feminist collectives involved with the promotion of alternative music and creation of safer spaces, such as Queer In Wonderland, FLUID and Club Hits Different. Driven by their interest in how our lives intersect with ecology, technology and the digital realm, they dive into speculative realities and dream their own utopias.
In Roodkapje they want to explore the many possibilities that collective art can open through The Happenings. Expect blurry boundaries between the tangible and the virtual, where dreams intertwine with reality through improv and playful approach, creating space for free-form and unbounded creativity.
Tisa World is a multidisciplinarian – primarily a vocalist, a composer and a conductor. With her voice, language and presence, she resides in the now; inventing interaction models that reach beyond the grid. When performing, she sources a song from the beyond, imaginatively plays with structures, narratives, poetry and emotion. In her research, she mystically traverses the practices of composition and improvisation, emphasizing their emancipatory potential. Driven by her insatiable curiosity for humans, imagination and emotions, she performs, exhibits, curates and publishes around the world: promiscuously, collaboratively, spontaneously and with great joy.
In Roodkapje she’s looking forward to work with fellow residents, to create and cross-pollinate between personal practices and each other’s collectives, in her case: the Singing Club and Mystery Sessions. She’s interested in the ways of interaction, collectively building and enjoying the moment of presence – the now. Be courageous and expect to be challenged!
Repelsteeltje
Repelsteeltje is a non-binary interdisciplinary artist living and working in Rotterdam. Their artistic practice is focused on ways of working collectively and non-hierarchical, using infrastructures like mutual aid and squatting to reclaim space in the city. Their work is a form of pro-active documentation, using observations from political engagement to build spaces of reflection. This takes the shape of printed matter, re-enactments, sounds and events. It is about sharing knowledge for, with and by the communities they are a part of and manifests in actions, gatherings and performances. There, they bring together artists, activists and other skillful nerds to make zines and art prints.
In Roodkapje they are looking forward to unexpected collaborations, to organize gatherings and release a movie, to get inspired and inspire others and also, share resources and get some back
previous residents
The members of Hamburger Community 2023 were: Viana Afoumou (vixnde), Maja Simišić, NDNMK Solutions, Emir Karyo, Jip Piet
Maja Simišić is a multimedia artist focusing on everyday battles, and finding ways to turn them on their head, carrying heavy subjects with lightheartedness and humour specific to her character. In her work she overthrows existing gender and class struggles fueled by analysing the expectations put on us by modern societal structures and historical narratives, applying her self developed methodology; the practice of ‘restroying’.
As a female from the Balkans, living and working in the western world, her artistic practice is deeply influenced by, on the one hand, the perception of the eastern European in western society, and on the other, the way in which people in the Balkans are raised, their fundamental beliefs, and the role of women in both of these contexts.
Maja seeks to escape the great Kafkaesque machine of oppression by building a fortress of collective imagination. She aims to be the queen of the uncanny valley led by mixed realities.
In the Hamburger Community – Test Site, Maja continues to work on her research into the bureaucracy involved in obtaining a (European) visa. As a child and as an adult she has often been involved in visa procedures and therefore she understands the cold reality of these bureaucratic and Kafka-esque procedures, the impact this has on people’s lives. She tackles this serious and frustrating subject in a humorous way in participatory performances in which she uses circus and theater to expose the oppressive systems together with the audience.
Extremely individualistic in nature, rooted in identity and identity politics, Maja asks her audience to question what is right in front of them. With a pinch of absurdity and a whole bunch of satire, she helps us see that all our realities are connected and that we need understanding and a certain willingness to accept differences in order to make an actual change.
Viana is a Brussels-born singer-songwriter, writer and artist, currently living in Rotterdam. In 2022, Viana graduated in Liberal Arts and Sciences at Erasmus University College Rotterdam, with a major in Political Philosophy and a minor in African Dynamics. Her academic background influences her practice, which is often intertwined with research and theory. Her voice is her main instrument. She likes jamming, improvising and bending genres – tools to break boundaries. She explores performance in its broader sense: as a conversational tool merging sound, visuals, theatricality and storytelling. Beyond music, she writes poetry, which she distributes through the city via stickers (and sometimes reads out loud), she develops audiovisual projects together with other musicians and filmmakers, she writes blog posts and long essays, and she designs DIY websites. She also bakes bread.
At Roodkapje, she will explore the theme “Red Hoods”, combining research, music, poetry, and live interaction with the public, discussing the different meanings of the word Hood, asking questions that shed light to its many socio-political perspectives, exploring the negotiation between the perception of the self and someone’s (perception of) safety in their “hood”. She is interested (and angry) in the paradoxal codes and etiquettes prescribed to different individuals in the streets..
Influenced by, and using the imagery of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, she reflects on advice she received since she was a young girl, on “how to avoid the big bad wolves out there”, while asking: What if there was a wolf under my own hood too? She wants to create a space to explore questions, share experiences, perspectives and be angry together against “the wolf”, while simultaneously exploring the wolves inside ourselves.
How do our hoods define the roles we take?
Emir Karyo (2000) is a graphic designer, multi-disciplinary artist and a mischievous explorer based in the Netherlands, originally from Istanbul, employing various storytelling tools such as airbrush, sculptures, and screens to deliver a multi-sensory impact. Through exploring distinct yet interconnected techniques with synthesizing analog and digital workflows, he finds common ground between graphic design and fine arts.
Through his work, Emir aims to take the viewer on a journey from the familiar to the unknown, where reality and fantasy intersect, and where the absurd and satirical coexist. These portals lead into a realm where the mundane becomes magical and where the over-privatized aspects of daily life are mocked and humorously criticized. In his methodology, improvisations and last-minute ideas are welcomed on a red carpet, while mistakes are entities that are celebrated during their catwalk.
NDNMK Solutions
“Ideology management”
11:11
☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆
In the Hamburger Community – Test Site, NDNMK’ will investigate how to make music and literature in a decentralized way where the audience can co-write/create, both physically and digitally. In addition, they will use different methods of world building in order to build new common worlds that cultivate empathy and new myths. Using different magical, occult and ritual practices to map this new world and to collectively look for different futures.
Program supported by:
