De Appel moves
De Appel has recently moved into the Temple broedplaats, in Diamantbuurt. De Appel was founded in 1975, and has been located in Nieuw-West for the last seven years. Its history is formed by the context of Amsterdam’s city and cultural policy as much as it is by progressive tendencies within its art scene. Soon after its establishment as a small project space, de Appel became internationally known for its alternative institutional model, born out of artists’ need to present performance and video art. Today, de Appel continues to act as host and hub for artistic and curatorial experimentation. Through a programme geared towards embedding art in schools and within society, a thirty-year-old Curatorial Programme, and an active archive, de Appel brings people together to practise a mutual exchange of knowledge through exhibitions and live activations.
De Appel is committed to resource-sharing with and among artists, cultural practitioners, school children, teenagers, university students, neighbours, curators, national and international cultural and educational organisations, in producing shared knowledge and defining aesthetics that challenge our understanding of art. In doing so, de Appel aims to contribute to artistic and socially relevant dialogues between various cultural and social organisations in Amsterdam and beyond. De Appel experiments with pedagogy outside of mainstream educational institutions and acts as a catalysing mechanism between academic research on art, on culture, and their constituencies. Our institutional values include experimentation, innovation, solidarity, collaboration, social impact, affirmative critique and artistic collective freedom. We strive to be a place of collaboration between artists, institutions, and communities, where we build regenerative collective models of curating and placemaking.
Our focus for the period of 2025-2028 is rooted in topics of land, co-ownership and housing, governance, (art) economy, and class.
Our focus for the period of 2025-2028 is rooted in topics of land, co-ownership and housing, governance, (art) economy, and class. These interrelated themes – which de Appel, like many art institutions, deals with internally on a daily basis – are collectivised because we believe that they are social and political issues that many people in the Netherlands are confronted with, both in rural and urban areas. Many artists tackle these issues on artistic and structural levels. We see the need to provide a space for an accumulation of singular conversations, proposals, and models that can lead to workable and liveable collective projects. We achieve this through our exhibition, curation, school and neighbourhood programmes, live activations, as well as through de Appel’s archive and library.
Through its curatorial focus, de Appel acts as a catalyst between academic institutions and artistic practice, both by artists and curators, in order to bring these practices to the general public through exhibitions and activation. Activation is highly important at de Appel, as it is where the artwork becomes a contact zone in bringing different groups together.
Beginning in September 2024, de Appel will collaborate with The Sandberg Institute and Gudskul to build a new Curatorial Programme together, called Lumbung Practice. Over 150 curators around the world have graduated from the CP since 1994, making it one of the oldest curatorial programmes in the world. The CP 2024-2026 will run in parallel and in partnership with The Sandberg Institute’s Temporary Programme ¬– Lumbung Practice in Amsterdam, and Gudskul’s Collective Study Programme in Jakarta. The partners will pool resources to practise Lumbung with a new generation of artists and curators. Lumbung is an Indonesian pre-colonial rural practice in which the surplus is collectively owned, managed, shared and celebrated for the future welfare of the community. Artistically developed by ruangrupa during documenta fifteen, it grew into a rhizomatic group of collectives, through the practice of decentralised collective redistribution, by which it transformed the art institution and its exhibition logic.
Since its inception in 1994, the CP has been a space for curatorial innovation and experimentation. It has remained relevant through the decades, pushing forward avant-garde curatorial practices. At a time when ethical questions about sustainability and inclusion are being raised, the persona of the omnipresent star curator is being challenged. In the next edition of the programme, curators will work more closely with artists and participants, learning together how to share resources, processes, and decision-making methodology, with a focus on building alternative institutions that are inclusive and sustainable.
Participating collectives will learn about forms of self-organisation, economic sustainability and transvestment, cosmologies of local communing, and other collective traditions with an application to contemporary artistic practice. They will be able to develop their skills through experimentation with collective artistic economies, organise public learning sessions, and practise collective curating. Many of the tutors featured in the programme will be artists from documenta fifteen and other local “meent” or commons initiatives.
De Appel is also involved with the Dutch Art Institute, where we run the de Appel COOP study group, entitled Assembling Land: Rehearsals towards Placemaking COOP. CP Fellow Marina Christodoulidou and Rotterdam-based artist Noor Abuarafeh teach on behalf of de Appel, with a focus on injustices related to confiscated land, to housing rights, and to imagining and exploring structures and models for the future.
De Appel’s archive, which consists of three parts – the library, the archive and the collection – comprises 300 linear metres of (artists’) books, photos, video, audio, manuscripts, correspondences, testimonies, and works of art. The archive is a condensed representation of contemporary international art in Amsterdam, and the history of de Appel since 1974. In its new home at the Temple, the archive is publicly accessible. Now located on the common ground floor, books can be openly consulted, while archival documents are housed in de Appel’s external storage facility. In addition, there will be a rotating display of video works selected from de Appel’s archive, along with associated archival material. The archive team posits questions such as: What does it mean to own an archive collectively?
In March, de Appel will open with a live activations programme, “live activations” being the contact zones that make public the aesthetics and knowledge produced within de Appel by co-owners and participants. The programme is titled Housewarming: Activations for a new location. It poses questions such as: What does a home for a cultural institution mean, and how can we warm it up together for the coming years? We would like to start the year together, thinking about land and housing in poetic and practical ways.
The exhibitions and live activations will be based on the need to learn from local and international experiences of collectivising land and housing
The main issues de Appel will be addressing in the coming years are those of housing, grassroots (art) economy, and governance. The exhibitions and live activations will be based on the need to learn from local and international experiences of collectivising land and housing, and in learning how communities, artists, and institutions have dealt with them.
Land is the frontier when it comes to struggles related to the environmental crisis, land grabbing, affordable housing, and so many others. In the current context of late capitalism, land is transposed as a commodity. We see political and social movements across the globe fighting for free and fair access to land and its resources. Artists have been spearheading and participating in these struggles, adopting and experimenting with shared ownership and different forms of defining the commons. The Housewarming programme includes performances, screenings and conversations.