damdam Harvest Festival is a public programme spanning 8 days convened by damdam, an interconnected web of collectives emerging from de Appel’s Curatorial Programme, the Lumbung Practice Temporary Master Programme at Sandberg Instituut and Gudskul’s Collective Study Programme in Indonesia. Between 28 May and 6 June 2025 at de Appel and several other locations in and outside of Amsterdam, damdam will host a public living space to introduce their ecosystem. 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 damdam:

Building on the 25 years of Lumbung kindred experiments leading to lumbung - documenta fifteen, for the first time this year we will gather with collectives to practice sustainable economies, to think about our collective infrastructures, shared practices, common resources and values. One of our values is caring about the process, rather than focusing on the production of artworks or exhibitions as isolated outputs. We turn toward each other and the relations that bind us. Our curatorial approach is embedded in the politics of friendship, interdependence, trust, collective joy as well as engagement with Amsterdam and our localities.

Alongside mapping our resources and needs in our ecosystem, we build a common ground and think about potential seeds to plant. Out of this process, several self-organised working groups emerged around common urgencies: community, land, economy, printing, publishing, pedagogy, documenting and archiving. In the Harvest Festival 2025 we share our understanding of lumbung practice and ongoing processes through nongkrongs (gatherings), workshops, screenings, discussions, dinners and parties. What kind of future can we envision if we reorient our work around sharing, communal rhythms, and solidarity?

dampack Resource Map
Installation at de Appel (Exhibition space)
Convened by Dam€ Dam€ Working Group
28 May – 6 June

Harvest TV: Rough Cuts, Loops of a Process
Installation at de Appel (Exhibition space)
Convened by Archive and Documentary Working Group
28 May - 6 June

Sharing the Harvest
Installation at de Appel (Exhibition space)
Convened by RE-PEAT/Khamoosh/Soundcamp
28 May - 6 June

Collaboration Guidelines
Installation at de Appel (Library)
Convened by Level Five
28 May - 6 June

BWookshop
Installation at Tetterode (M4)
Convened by Printing and Publishing Working Group
Accessible during programmes at M4

All programmes are free to attend, however, some have limited capacity and require reservations in advance. Reservation links are added below.

Isolation in Formal Education and the Struggle to Make University a Shared Home
Monday 26 May, 16.00 - 21.00 at Sandberg Institute
Talk at convened by dash, no registration necessary

This gathering brings together voices from across the Sandberg Institute and HKU Master of Fine Arts departments to examine the individualistic frameworks embedded in formal education, and to ask: how can we move toward more collective, connected, and caring ways of learning together? How can we cultivate belonging in education and make the university our home? We hope this can be a starting point to link existing initiatives and individuals into longer-term networks of mutual support and shared vision. To learn from past generations’ initiatives and recognise their legacy.

damdam invites students, tutors, and initiatives who care about these questions to come together, reflect, discuss, and connect. This is a pre-event of the Harvest Festival, intended as a public moment in our ongoing process of working through shared struggles, an invitation to think, speak, and imagine collectively.

Opening Ceremony
Wednesday 28 May, 16.00 - 20.00 at de Appel
Talk and game, no registration necessary

We are excited to invite you to the damdam Harvest Festival Opening Ceremony at de Appel. Join us as we unbox our terminology and structure, open up about our process, unwrap the upcoming program, and unveil our resource map to share with you. Inspired by one of our many check-in rounds at Sandberg, we’ve invited a few members of damdam who have been more active in the local contexts we come from, rather than in Amsterdam, to introduce the festival from their perspective. For us it is an occasion to reflect on what this program has meant to them and how it has resonated with or influenced the collectives in our localities. Afterwards, we’ll host a round of our notorious Lotería Lumbung, a traditional Mexican bingo game, followed by micheladas and drinks. Come by for the chance to win a special prize and kick off the Harvest Festival in style!

Postering workshop, walk and talk with notshitprint
Thursday 29 May, 17.00 - 19.30 at Tetterode (M4)
Workshop
Register here

Join us at the DIY printing station at M4 for a postering workshop, walk and talk about the underground postering scene with notshitprint, a social justice print shop based in Amsterdam. They work with risograph printing, sticker printing, non-commercial and non-profit printing for campaigns that help make things not shit. Come with your slogans and ideas!

Print Open Space + BWookshop
Thursday 29 May, 14.00 - 20.00 at Tetterode (M4)
Open workspace

During the print open space, the DIY printing station at M4 can be used to experiment with different printing methods such as riso, lino and silkscreen, while hanging out and building community. Come and join us for print and beers!

Polyamory as the Cat Out of the Bag
Thursday 29 May, 17.00 - 20.00 at de Appel (Exhibition space)
Workshop convened by Typography
Register here

A conversation-based game exploring the multitudes of affective relationships characteristic of cultural work. Featuring stories from fellow cultural workers, artists, and friends, this game invites participants to reflect on their experiences of physical and mental distance, contradictory affiliations, and romantic lives that often become inseparable from professional ones. Hosted by Evgeniia Skvortsova, a member of Typography Collective and coordinator of the self-organised media project Gasp Magazine, and initially conceived by Scottish socially-oriented artist Andrew Paterson, this game unfolds like a collective pillow talk.

Film Pot: A Simmering Brew of Narratives, Localities, Collective Visions
Unclaimed Territories: Spaces not Held by Locks
Friday 30 May, 18.00 - 20.00 at Tetterode (Tetlokaal)
Screening, no registration necessary

In this edition, we drift through the cracks — into spaces taken, shared, and made anew. Through films that trace acts of inhabiting and imagining otherwise, we explore how walls become proposals, floors become commons, and roofs hold not just shelter, but possibility. The screening includes a mid-length docudrama — a fever dream about and by the (Rotterdam) squatting scene of its era. We’ll also feature a film by Taring Padi, a collective of underground artists from Yogyakarta, Indonesia, formed in 1998 amid the political upheaval following the fall of Suharto. The films will also be made available after the harvest festival through the lumbung.space digital platform, extending their reach beyond the screening and into wider, shared spaces of reflection.

Biquini Wookshop :0 (Where we sell everything except books :) !!! + Print Open Space
Saturday 31 May, 13.00 - 22.00 at Tetterode (M4)
Performances, happenings and workshops, no registration necessary

During the first edition of the Harvest Festival, Biquini Wax launches its first pop-up: Biquini Wookshop. With “books” by Zyan Arellano, Irak Morales, Gerardo Contreras, Mili Herrera, Adolfo Cisneros Medina, dianx cantarey, Gustavo A. Cruz Cerna, denisse vega de santiago, Odeth Sofía, Daniel Aguilar Ruvalcaba and Urmeer.

As an economic and community experiment, aligned with our interest in studying Lumbung Practices through the cross-eyed gaze of baroque economies, what better way than to propose a homemade, baroque, informal, and overflowing book business model? Biquini Wookshop rethinks books as merchandise, publication as a form of exhibition, performance and the book-commodity as a sub-critical fetish. The BWookshop hosts, converges, stages, and spatially engages with the printing station of the Printing and Publishing working group from damdam at M4, our shared home in Amsterdam with damdam collective dash. Join us for performance, collective writing, zine making, face painting, drawing happenings, surprise events and artists, immaterial and material merch, and more.

The Printing and Publishing working group will activate the M4 residency space at Tetterode into a DIY printing station, hosting guests and friends for independent and collective self-publishing. The Printing and Publishing station contains a library with contributions by members of damdam and their broader ecosystem. This includes DIY publications by SPIN, Papaya Kuir, material and immaterial merch by Biquini Wax, and The Print Bike by Kasi Graphic.

My Little Pony - School of Friendship
Saturday 31 May, 14.00 - 17.00 at de Appel (Library)
Fanfiction writing workshop covened by repelsteeltje
Register here

Learning in groups can bring far more knowledge than just what is presented in books, thanks to everypony bringing their personal perspectives. Group dynamics greatly influence both what and how you learn. The Lumbung Practice studies is ultimately about learning from each other and making friends, just like the My Little Pony School of Friendship.

After a short introduction on the My Little Pony universe and the ‘school of friendship’ TV episodes, we will write fanfiction inspired by dynamics or situations we have experienced while studying in a group. This way, we will reflect on (and archive) group dynamics in a playful way. Everypony with experience of learning in groups is welcome in this workshop.

Somatic Laboratory - Trans*latinx Memories
Saturday 31 May, 13.00 - 17.00 at Tetterode (Tetlokaal)
Workshop convened by Papaya Kuir
Register here

Somatic Lab is a method and form of working and connecting with the body, a way to understand the memories our bodies carry. It investigates how stories become embedded in our bodies, our voices and our memories, through post-extractivist archival methodologies and experimental documentation practices.

Somatic Laboratory: Living Archives delves into the affordances of expanded publishing to preserve the subtleties of community processes. By offering an alternative mode of dissemination that defies the assumptions of transparency in documentation, this initiative seeks to create a multisensory sonic archive, merging the haptic qualities of storytelling to document and honour the experiences of Latinx migrants and LGBTQ+ asylum seekers, while promoting anti-racist and trans*feminist practices to the wider community of artists, educators, and researchers. This workshop is facilitated by Flavia Pinheiros, Paula Montecinos and Alejandra Ortiz.

Can the Archive Be Held in Common? Forms of Recording within Collective Projects
Sunday 1 and Monday 2 June, 10.00 - 17.00 at de Appel
Archive workshop
Register here

In this workshop we will approach the archive as a space of negotiation. We aim to investigate practices of recording and archiving that are open, responsive, and dynamic within collective processes. Over two days, participants will engage with a constellation of materials from damdam collective of collectives, to experiment with building an archive for a collective project. Sketches, texts, traces of conversations and symbolic objects that came from damdam’s archive will serve as raw material to be rearranged and interpreted through the participants’ sensibilities and their engagement with questions of archival accountability. Collecting, mapping, and composing a collaborative history or manual of the archive will be among the activities undertaken during the workshop. What emerges will remain in the space as part of the Harvest Festival: an evolving landscape of how we hold, share, and make sense of collective archive and memory — together. The archive created during this time is not fixed; it is open to change, interpretation, and contribution, and is meant to shift alongside the collaborative process itself.

This workshop is facilitated by the damdam Archive and Documentary working group, and Arash Dehghani, an artist-researcher whose work explores creative approaches to the archives and the social lives of extracted materials.

Sonic Grounds: Exploring our Cultural and Political Relationship to Land
Tuesday 3 June, 10.00 - 17.00 at de Appel (Exhibition space)
Radio broadcast convened by SPIN & Makmur Djaja, no registration necessary

SPIN invites you to a live radio broadcast from the Learning Grounds Garden in Rotterdam, where we ask: What land-based culture are we trying to build together for the future? This broadcast is a collaboration and will feature initiatives in the Netherlands and Indonesia, including members of Sixpack. It will include stories, guided activities, music and conversation, exploring how the narratives we tell about land shape our cultural relationship to it. You’re invited to join us in person at the Learning Grounds Garden, where a space will be set up for people to gather, listen, and connect during the live broadcast. At the same time, a listening space at de Appel in Amsterdam will offer a place to tune in and interact with the guided activities of the programme.

Film Pot: A Simmering Brew of Narratives, Localities, Collective Visions
Maps We Refuse, Routes We Share
Tuesday 3 June, 17.30 - 20.30 at de Appel (Exhibition space)
Screening, no registration necessary

In this edition, we will screen films shaped by contexts, politics, and the urgencies of collective existence. From migrant precarity to queer resistance, from paralegal limbos to cultural remainings, these works are situated in contexts where borders — of nations, identities, and systems — mark the body and shape the possible.

Rather than attempt to resolve or universalise these realities, the films speak from within them. Together, they form a conversation across distance — each one a fragment, a pulse, a declaration from the edge. The films include works from Papaya Kuir, a collective by and for Latin American migrants and refugees residing in the Netherlands, and Cut and Rescue, a collective of young experimental artists from Indonesia. Each brings forth stories grounded in local urgencies but resonant far beyond. The films will also be made available after the harvest festival through the lumbung.space digital platform, extending their reach beyond the screening and into wider, shared spaces of reflection.

The Court of Apples: Reflections on Collaborative Practice
Wednesday 4 June, 10.00 - 17.00 at de Appel (Exhibition space)
Workshop convened by Millemains
Register here

Through a juicy role-play game, participants will explore the limits and possibilities of collective authorship in artistic creation. By experimenting with various collaborative protocols, participants will confront the following questions through a court case: How does a collaborative creation process influence the created object? What types of power dynamics does it create? How far can we push the collaborative cursors? What status do co-created objects acquire? There will be two slots for participating in the role-play game: 10.00 - 12.00 and 14.00 - 16.00. A meal will be shared at lunch time.

Disobedient Bodies & Fugitive Aesthetics
Wednesday 4 June, 16.00 - 19.00 at Tetterode (M4)
Workshop convened by Papaya Kuir
Register here

Disobedient Bodies & Fugitive Aesthetics is a workshop exploring the intersection between performance, social justice and somatics. We will explore and play through the lenses of somatic abolitionism, speculative fiction and disobedient performance practices. We will experience different relationships to time and space as a way to imagine alternative ways of relating to the world, being in the world and reproducing the world. Based on non-Western concepts like trans-corporeality and travelling worlds we will practise decentring our human gaze, give agency to more-than-human bodies, and practise our capacity for merging or existing in two or more realities at the same time.

The sessions will be playgrounds where our capacity for radical imagination and speculative fiction is expanded. From looking into legacies of decolonial and anti-colonial Art-making, to embodied practices with the potential to transform our sense of normality into absurd, magic, protest or mythical landscapes where objects/elements can serve as liminal spaces, the session will give us renewed narratives of how we can perceive and exist in the world. It is an invitation to re-storying and re-worlding while decentring the human extractivist and individualist oriented gaze. This workshop is facilitated by Pau(la) Chaves Bonilla a.k.a La ChicaScratch.

Print Open Space + BWookshop
Wednesday 4 June, 14.00 - 20.00 at Tetterode (M4)
Workspace and shop, no registration necessary

Radio Fantasia
Wednesday 4 June, 17.00 - 20.00 at de Appel (Exhibition space) and online
Radio broadast, no registration necessary

A translocal listening session and shared sonic space unfolding across cities, time zones and contexts. Simultaneously hosted at de Appel and partner locations in Yerevan, and Cologne, the event bridges distance through curated DJ sets and live audio transmissions. This gathering explores listening as a way of archiving, connecting, and resisting — not only through what is heard, but how, and with whom. Rather than a conventional party, this is a drifting, echoing encounter between scenes and communities, stitched together through frequencies and mutual attention.

Lumbung Land - Teach-In
Thursday 5 June, 15.00 - 18.00 at de Appel
Lectures, readings and conversation
Register here

Various collectives and individuals are invited to share their reflections and practices related to collective ownership of land and space: Karin Christof explores the importance of autonomous urban spaces for living, working, and socialising, and the evolving role of citizens in providing these (semi) public services; Natasha Hulst on community land trust, transforming our relationship to land and each other; the Zapatismo Study Group brings texts to read collectively from the revolutionary Zapatista through which we can (re)imagine in and around the possibility of the Commons/El Común; and Mathijs van de Sande on communalism as a democratic repertoire in the Situationist movements of the 1960s, the European squatters’ movements in the 1970s and 1980s and contemporary municipalism. We will share a (vegan) soup afterwards.

Lumbung Land - Screening
Thursday 5 June, 18.00 - 21.00 at de Appel
Screening
Register here

We will be screening Direct Action (2024) by Guillaume Cailleau and Ben Russell, on the life rhythm of the farmers and activist community in ZAD Notre-Dame-des-Landes. This is the place where they successfully opposed the building of an airfield by building collective life on and with the land — a revolution that they put into practice every day. It is possible to reclaim the power to act.

Print Open Space + BWookshop
Friday 6 June, 14.00 - 20.00 at Tetterode (M4)
Workspace and shop, no registration necessary

Film Pot: A Simmering Brew of Narratives, Localities, Collective Visions
Echoes of the Process, Open-Ended: Seeds for the Future
Friday 6 June, 17.00 - 20.00 at de Appel
Screening
Invite only

In this edition, we gather as part of the intimate closing moment of the Harvest Festival at de Appel — an evening of film, reflection, and shared presence. The programme brings together visions shaped by our collective process: glimpses into what has been lived, questioned, and imagined along the way. Together, we’ll watch, listen, and hold space for dialogue — letting the films stir what words alone cannot. we open space to reflect on the process of working collectively — and to plant seeds for future forms of learning, making, and being together.