We let go of the traditional idea of an exhibition with a start and end point. Instead, we are organizing ploegendiensten with artists, writers and collectives.
Every season, there is a Samenscholingsweek, in which activities are bundled into an exuberant whole of artistic and social experiment. For this program, we collaborate with art collective Sunflower Soup and curator Lenn Cox. The first Samenscholingsweek took place in the week of March 17-22. The results of this first Shiftwork and Samenscholing can still be seen until mid-June.
Ploegendienst 1:
Work period: January/February/March 2025
Spring Samenscholing: March 17 - 22, 2025
Visit: March 17 - June 18, 2025
During this first ploegendienst, Sunflower Soup, Zaban Razdar and Notshitprint have been working in Plaatsmaken for the past few months. A central question in the work created during this first ploegendienst is how the West views the way in which oppressed people have fought for their liberation in different places and at different times, or are still doing so.
About the artists/curators:
Sunflower Soup
Art collective Sunflower Soup emerged from a shared activist commitment and an urgent need to explore what art can mean beyond the personal, isolated individual. The collective is driven by a series of lively questions: can working in community foster a less passive, more participatory experience of art? How can art contribute to the politics of the everyday in which people relate to each other and to the more-than-human, planetary world? How do we reconcile the importance of activism with a poetic visual language that allows for humor, paradox, and ambiguity?
Lenn Cox
Lenn Cox is a community organizer, artist, educator, and program maker. She explores solidarity economies by immersing herself in self-organized learning-working-living environments, many with an ecofeminist and queer heart. She uses clothing and navigation maps to carry the exchanges and stories she collects. Lenn initiates gatherings that enable collective learning. An ongoing investigation into how we organize ourselves, what we can learn from each other, and what is at stake in the cultural field and beyond.
Zaban Razdar is in the holy land to support the indigenous population in their fight against ethnic cleansing together with other activists. In between, he picks up the pen to write off the Palestinian he is in love with.
Adil/ Notshitprint
Printing house for social justice. Notshitprint is a non-commercial printing house for activists and grassroots projects.
Tabea Nixdorff is an artist, typographer, and researcher. Her artistic practice includes (self) publishing, sound and language-based performances, collaborative learning, and social gatherings.
Anne Krul is an Afropese visual artist, poet, archivist, and activist. She was a member of Strange Fruit, an organization for young queer people from diverse cultural backgrounds (1989-2002).
Archival Textures is a publication series that gives space to unlikely finds from traditional archives, local community archives, conversations and personal collections, to find narratives from the past that can feed our current vocabularies of resistance and solidarity.
Abhishek Thapar (Stadsatelier Arnhem)
The Indian-Dutch theatre maker and storyteller Abhishek Thapar makes visual and intimate performances on the border between documentary and fiction. His performance can be seen at Plaatsmaken as part of the collaborative project Stadsatelier Arnhem.
Hospitality Club
For our small-scale educational projects we work together with the Hospitality Club, which consists of Mirka Farabegoli and Krista Burger. We involve primary schools from the neighbourhood, young people, children, ArtEZ students and MBO students and residents.
The Ploegendiensten and Samenscholingen are part of the programmes H0ha (by Sunflower Soup) and Time Out Tune In (by Lenn Cox). Read more about the programs here.