damdam Harvest Festival 2025

You are invited to a 8 day long public programme convened by damdam, an interconnected web of collectives emerging from de Appel’s Curatorial Programme, the Lumbung Practice program at Sandberg Instituut and Gudskul from Indonesia. Between 29 May and 6 June 2025, at de Appel and in several other locations in and outside of Amsterdam, the collective will convene a public living space to introduce their ecosystem, and get to know each other better. It's a celebration — a first exercise in the unfolding of coalition-building through contradiction, starting from a belief in the possibility of constructing a platform where we can work from our struggles, expand collectivities, and find more examples and inspirations in the work of allied collectives. Below is an invitation from the collective:

Building on the legacy of 30 years of de Appel’s Curatorial Programme, this time we will gather in a different setting, with collectives to practice sustainable economies, radically think about infrastructures and institutions, and create resources and methods based on our shared values. Our core value is to care about the process, to think about how we are doing things, and link it to our real needs, dilemmas, and limitations. Rather than focusing on the production of artworks or exhibitions as isolated outputs, we turned inward—toward each other, and the processes that bind us. Our curatorial approach is embedded in the politics of friendship, interdependence, trust, engagement and collective joy. We tried to focus on building sustainable networks and ecosystems that people belong to. During the first edition of our Harvest Festival, we are going to celebrate and harvest the fruits we planted and took care of in the process, to be able to move forward and plant seeds for the future.

We started with three months of Majelis (gatherings) of collectives that shared their future plans, lifelines, questions and challenges. Alongside mapping our resources and needs in our ecosystem, we want to build a common ground and think about potential seeds to plant. Out of this process, several self-organised working groups emerged around common urgencies: Land, Economy, Printing and Publishing, Archive/Documentary, Lumbung Club, and Pedagogy. In the first edition of Harvest Festival, these initiatives are going to share their processes, celebrate and harvest the ongoing process through Nonkrongs (gatherings), workshops, screenings and discussions. What kind of future can we envision if we reorient our work around sharing, more nature-aligned rhythms, and solidarity?

More information and the full programme will follow soon!