The Want - Theatre and Talks

AstaroTheatro, Friday, June 19 at 08:00 PM GMT+2

The Want
Theatre and Talks

Bear in mind that “you must want something”!
Or would you rather live in the mountains and play your bilur?
Be aware that you are nothing but a consumer in a consumers’ world. Unless you don’t want The Want.

We perform a short excerpt from ‘In the solitude of the cotton fields’ by Bernard-Marie Koltès where our dramaturgical analysis underlines the consumerism and the commodification in society.
We sit together and we engage in an open conversation about the topics highlighted by the theatre performance: from commodification to war, from environmental disaster to autonomous communities, from the manipulation of love to anything we would like to discuss.

Harun Turan: Performance and Bilur
Roberto Bacchilega: Performance
An AstaroTheatro and A La Muntagna Production

Friday 19 June 20:00
AstaroTheatro
Sint Jansstraat 37 
Amsterdam
www.astarotheatro.com
www.ourfootsteps.nl 
Entrance by Donation

https://offbeat.amsterdam/event/the-want-theatre-and-talks

#amsterdam #oudekerk #jessedarling #godsworth #amsterdamchurches #oudekerkamsterdam

STATEMENT AND COUNTER-STATEMENT 1 + 2 by Experimental Jetset

San Serriffe, Saturday, June 13 at 06:00 PM GMT+2

with talks by Dutton Hauhart, Lieven Lahaye and Experimental Jetset at 6.30pm

We kindly invite you to join us for a special evening dedicated to the release of the two latest paperbacks by Experimental Jetset – their new monograph (‘Statement and Counter-Statement 2: Typologies/ Typographies/ Topologies/ Topographies’) and the reprint of their previous monograph (‘Statement and Counter-Statement: Notes on EJ, Vol. 1’), both published by Roma Publications.
The event will feature two speakers doing short talks – first, there’s Dutton Hauhart, who will tell something about the proofreading of both paperbacks; in fact, Dutton has been the proofreader of all of Experimental Jetset’s paperbacks (and the in-house proofreader of Roma Publications and Idea Books as well), so he might have some interesting things to say about correcting text. Secondly, there’s artist/librarian Lieven Lahaye, contributor to the second paperback, who will read an excerpt from the essay that he wrote for EJ – ‘!KOM direkt’ (‘!COME immediately’), mapping a dérive-like journey through the archive. Added to that, Experimental Jetset will be there as well, signing (or rather, stamping) their books. So when in town, do drop by.

https://offbeat.amsterdam/event/statement-and-counter-statement-1-2-by-experimental-jetset

PARAPRAXIS: Wendy Lotterman in conversation with Tessel Veneboer

San Serriffe, Wednesday, June 10 at 07:00 PM GMT+2

Parapraxis Wendy Lotterman in conversation with lecturer Tessel Veneboer at 7pm

“From error to error,” Freud wrote, “one discovers the whole truth.” This is the guiding light of the magazine Parapraxis: its pieces risk error to name a truth, in an effort to provide a concrete way for readers and writers to work through their psychic life by way of the written word. If psychoanalysis in the twenty-first century is often cloistered and inward-looking, sometimes violent, and the more public-minded thinking around psychoanalysis is exclusively passed through the narrow sieves of the academy and clinical institutions, or shoehorned into other publishing venues, Parapraxis aims to provide a home for psychoanalytic writing and creativity, addressed to the common reader.

A discussion between the senior editor of Parapraxis Wendy Lotterman and lecturer Tessel Veneboer.

Doors: 7.45pm

https://offbeat.amsterdam/event/parapraxis-wendy-lotterman-in-conversation-with-tessel-veneboer

BEYOND THE MANOSPHERE

San Serriffe, Tuesday, June 30 at 06:00 PM GMT+2

What does it mean to be a man today? This question has become increasingly urgent with the rise of the ‘manosphere’, a loose network of online spaces where a brash, misogynistic masculinity is asserted that, to many, feels threatening. Fueled by the spread of Trumpism, this brand of masculinity has become increasingly mainstream. The artworks in Beyond the Manosphere – Masculinities Today explore masculinity as an agent and performance of power – but also as a lived reality that can be conflicting, banal, unsteady, and tender. They approach masculinity as a broad and layered phenomenon, beyond dominant clichés.

https://offbeat.amsterdam/event/beyond-the-manosphere

MARLIE MUL

San Serriffe, Saturday, June 27 at 06:00 PM GMT+2

https://offbeat.amsterdam/event/marlie-mul

CHOUCAIR with Riet Wijnen

San Serriffe, Thursday, June 25 at 06:00 PM GMT+2

Choucair’s interests included genetic science, the infinite, the Arabic poetry form Qasida and Sufi philosophy. According to her, the Islamic rejection of the pictorial image led to the essential search for what one wanted to express, and was for her a fundamental way to understand Arabic intellectual thinking which she translated a.o. into abstract sculptures and paintings.

Wijnen visited the estate in Choucair’s last apartment in the Qatari neighbourhood in Beirut. There she was confronted by a large amount of works, photos and documents in French and Arabic, languages she does not speak, write nor read. This visit led to her development of non-linguistic research methods, an inquiry into how one might “speak nearby”* and position themselves in the work. Wijnen will share works and tools currently in development: a publication, sculptural dinnerware and a series of fermentation pots. These works will also feed into a fictional conversation with Choucair, which is part of a long term cycle, since 2015, titled Sixteen Conversations on Abstraction. *Trinh T. Minh–ha

https://offbeat.amsterdam/event/choucair-with-riet-wijnen

RIVERWORK by Lisa Robertson with Mia You

San Serriffe, Saturday, June 20 at 06:00 PM GMT+2

Lisa Robertson in conversation with Mia You and short readings from Riverwork by Taylor Ljubica, Macarena Magaña Villar, Antonio Manso Preto, Mehmet Süzgün & Sara Vallis

Some ruins are invisible.

Under the pavements of Paris there lies buried an ancient river, the Bièvre. For years, Lucy Frost has walked along these streets, unaware of the water and history under her feet, on her way to clean the apartments of Paris’s academic class. As she begins to study and transcribe the inherited notebooks and papers of her great-aunt, a teacher and researcher who disappeared years earlier, she commits to continuing her aunt’s youthful research on the Bièvre, mining the river’s documentary traces in the works of Rousseau, Rabelais, Hugo, Chateaubriand, and the like. She uncovers a history of industry: paper mills, dyeing workshops, tanneries, and textile manufacturers – and laundries.

She finds resonances of her own labour in the history of the river’s laundresses. On stolen time at work, and in her insomniac hours of nightwriting, she fills notebooks with these woven stories and descriptions of obsolete sites, textiles, cosmologies, and voices, constructing her own forms of relation with the lost.

Riverwork unearths not just an urban river but also a philosophy of research and the archive, a politics of hydrology, an ontology of ageing and belatedness, and a consideration of the unrepresented labour of women, past and present. Along the way it brings to life, in pyrotechnic prose, a long-gone Paris and both its domestic workers and its writers.

https://offbeat.amsterdam/event/riverwork-by-lisa-robertson-with-mia-you

IN BUT NOT OF with Cecilia Casabona and Noam Youngrak Son

San Serriffe, Friday, June 26 at 06:00 PM GMT+2

Working within cultural institutions creates a core tension: how can you stay independent while trying to change the very systems you’re part of? In But Not Of: Practices of Commoning in Art and Infrastructure explores that tension by mapping out how “commons” can exist both outside and inside the structures of cultural production.

With contributions from Andrea J. Nightingale, Andrea Thal, Bianca Schick, Binna Choi, Chris Lee, Clara Balaguer, Dalia Maini, Josh Plough, Lorenzo Gerbi, Madhumita Nandi, Maren Bang, Nina Martin, Noam Youngrak Son, Noura Alkhalili, Pete Fung, Peter Linebaugh, Simon Fairlie, Wojciech Matejko, and Yin Awien, this collection goes beyond the usual critiques of institutions. It connects cultural commoning to wider histories of social struggle – from the privatization of common land in Britain to the destruction of Palestinian shared farming systems under colonial rule. The book looks at the spaces around institutions as both fragile commons and practical foundations for change.

Through essays, real-world examples, and fiction, these cultural organizers, writers, and artists from different fields and places tackle this tension head-on. How do collectives survive budget cuts and political crackdowns? How do Indigenous ways of knowing challenge institutional ideas about sharing and care? Can circulation and debt be turned into tools for redistribution? And how can speculation and science fiction help us practice autonomy even within systems that limit it?
Instead of just talking about autonomy, this collection pushes for real strategies. It gives cultural organizers a crucial framework for navigating conflicting values—especially now, when the same institutions can fund both decolonial art and genocide.

https://offbeat.amsterdam/event/in-but-not-of-with-cecilia-casabona-and-noam-youngrak-son

THE TROUBLE OF ALL with Elisa Piazzi and Inna Kochkina

San Serriffe, Friday, June 19 at 06:00 PM GMT+2

conversation with Elisa Piazzi, Inna Kochkina and Amy Gowen & reading performance by Antrianna Moutoula

What does universality mean? Can it ever be achieved without collapsing into systems of generalisation or oppression?
The Trouble of All challenges the tendency to oversimplify the concept of universality, emphasising the need to complicate it instead.Working with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as both lens and tool, the publication brings together voices from art, law, pedagogy, type design, and performance to question universality and human rights as neutral or equally shared by all. Instead, it invites readers to rethink, question, and continually rewrite what universality – and shared human rights – mean in our common world.

With contributions by Parsa Abidi, Inna Kochkina, Mohammad Mishal, Antrianna Moutoula, Elisa Piazzi, Caterina Santullo and Irina Shapiro.

https://offbeat.amsterdam/event/the-trouble-of-all-with-elisa-piazzi-and-inna-kochkina