Service at Dappermarkt is a one-day event in which four artists exchange a wayward and unique artistic service in an exchange with market visitors – for money, something tangible or intangible, symbolic or material. Out of many wonderful applications, four services were selected and will be delivered on the street market on Saturday 5 September. The project aims to go beyond the logic of the service industry, but instead invites artists to reinvent and appropriate the idea of "service" according to their needs and values.

This project is a joint activity of Lesia Kulchynska’s Service, de Appel Kiosk, and Sepp Eckenhaussen’s Shared Visions. Each of the three is a long-term project aiming to manipulate the economic rules of artistic labour. In Service at Dappermarkt, they collaborate for the first time.

Towel Animal Workshop by Sixin Chen invites market visitors to a public workshop, where the artist shares her animal towel-folding archive as a creative medium. Participants learn origami logic extended into animal forms, a process that explores affective labour: the invisible creativity, care, and communication carried within a gentle form. The workshop space becomes a physical decentralised node, where interaction relies on anonymous exchange. The market shifts from a place of transaction into a community. Each towel animal left behind becomes an avatar of its maker.

Administrative Poffertjes is a participatory extension of Denitsa Ilcheva’s ongoing project Administrative Porn, which transforms bureaucracy into a performative and absurd form of hospitality. Visitors cannot simply buy poffertjes: before receiving a small portion, they must complete an administrative procedure involving forms, stamps, waiting time and official validation. The work humorously exposes how everyday life is increasingly mediated by institutional procedures. The service itself becomes the artwork: visitors do not purchase food, but experience bureaucracy as a ritual. By replacing efficiency with unnecessary administration, Administrative Poffertjes invites participants to laugh at systems of control while physically taking part in them.

Borys Kashapov will paint the nails of market visitors in exchange for listening to his stories. Since he left his home country because of war, the artist has lived a nomadic life, without having a permanent studio. That’s why he shifted to the smallest possible format: he now create his paintings not on canvases that need to be transported and stored, but on the nails of the people he meets, turning them into live nomadic art institutions that tour the nail exhibition wherever they go, discussing it with their friends or random interlocutors.

For his service, Berend Kemmeren invites groups of people – friends or strangers – to gather around a picnic table and eat apples together. The apples function as a catalyst rather than the goal. Participants decide together what happens: tasting, comparing, inventing games, telling stories, making rules, breaking them, or doing something entirely unexpected. The service offers a temporary space where conversation, play, absurdity and shared attention can unfold through an everyday activity. Rather than delivering an outcome, the artist facilitates a situation in which ordinary gestures can gradually become strange, humorous or memorable through participation.

Visit Service at Dappermarkt on Saturday 5 September, between 10:00–17:00!