Curatorial Programme 2023 – Dear Islands,

Please note: De Appel is taking part in the global strike for Palestine and will be closed on 20 October 2023. Dear Islands, is postponed to Saturday 21 October 2023 at 15:00. We will use this time to educate our selves about the history of this moment in order to work for a better future for everyone. We invite you to join by listening to this compilation by the Learning Palestine Group.

Dear Islands, is where we start our conversations on imagining, creating, and forging an archipelagic alliance for possible futures. For the purposes of facilitating intimacy in a new group, this gathering is a closed session. Invitation is upon request via: maria [​at​] deappel.nl.

No islands are without stories. The works we share in Dear Islands, approach filmmaking and screening as a form of storytelling and healing; reckoning with silenced histories, suppressed memories, and intergenerational traumas in East Asia. Films from different times and regions were chosen collectively for conversation. The films touch upon topics of death and continuity, wounds and wonders, borders and the borderless from a feminist perspective. These films do not adhere to a single aesthetic style, nor do they abide by a single political perspective or ideology. Interweaving plural bodies, waves of waters, sounds of the human and the non-humans, the films foster an islandscape that embraces the complexity of the universe and encourages dialogue between diverse forms of existence. Connecting stories is a way to create new constellations and relations, driven by the hope of forging alternative ways of understanding an archipelagic alliance.

Partner bio
dot to dot is a collective that learns from archipelagic alliances to shape the world via forms of storytelling. Through screenings, readings, and different forms of conversations, the dialogue dives into the waves of plural histories and memories where it also allows new flows of imagination. Click here to subscribe for the newsletter of dot to dot.