We could not escape the City. The Floods had taken back much of the land and destroyed many buildings. Sure, the City was not hit as badly as others and the centre was fortified against the sea with a sturdy retaining wall, but the old buildings weren’t made for the new weather. The hard rain and the heat. The Monsoon. But the City adapted quickly. It was remarkable really. As a political island-state, the City had an air of Utopia and it was never short of capital—or archit
Martina Raponi – Amsterdam Alternative Interview At 15.10 on Wednesdays- Miss Martina and I share cigarettes, a series of random YouTube videos, and a passion for the same perfumes. Half-Italian and half a part of every city she’s lived in since leaving her hometown, she writes and talks about Noiserr, an art I had never hear of. Self-made, raw and authentic, this woman is a hurricane. If you are as curious about her as I am at this point, you can go look for her Butcher’
Who dares to dream of a form of living beyond the constraints of capitalist dependencies, right here in Amsterdam? Alone, one does not quite dare to, but that is why one comes together... With the success of NieuwLand, new ideas are sprouting from the ground of Amsterdam Oost. As an outgrowth of the NieuwLand project, a group is forming around the ambition of building from scratch a living space experimenting with postcapitalist ideas. Though all is still in the early stages, there is a te
Het einde van de wereld gaat niet over één nacht vuur. We fietsen langs brandende barricades over gebroken glas en stenen en krijgen, god zij met ons, geen lekke banden. We lenen onze bivakmutsen uit aan broeders en zusters van de nacht. U vraagt me wat vakantie is? Hamburg, 2017. Een meisje met opgetekende wenkbrauwen sloopt met opgeheven vuistje de sigarettenautomaat van naast de Rote Flora. Een jong koppel gooit een blusdeken over hun ontlaakte kliko. Mijn vrienden in h
How to Save Our Planet in Six Acts by Philip Kitcher & Evelyn Fox Keller Book review by Jasper Coppes ACT SEVEN ANOTHER SEASON? In the studio Noon. Storm rages in the North of Amsterdam. It is the 14th of April 2018 and the winter seems to have extended far into spring. Rain pours down on the streets like in a movie-set, in an almost exaggerated manner. It splashes on the Perspex skylight of a studio building, amplifying the rainfall to biblical propo
Thanks to the Cambridge Analytica scandal and popular political tv comedian Arjen Lubach, Dutch people are now on the forefront of breaking up with Facebook. On April 16th, activists of the _Facebook Liberation Army_ organized a Facebook break-up party in Amsterdam, their second after 2015, rehashing Dutch WWII resistance rhetoric to call upon people to join its ranks. No doubt that Facebook deserves this. In a recent _Volkskrant_ article, a former worker for the company whose (minimum-
Every issue of AA we will try to highlight a squat of Amsterdam. A lot of these places are now part of history, but they’ve contributed to what Amsterdam is. We speak to free spirits that have lived, worked or performed in these places and try to give you a feeling of what the place and its members were about. There are specific spaces in the city that are especially worth to remember. Spaces that have been evicted, closed and gradually disappeared from our memory in the past few years. S
In late February 2018 Dutch news outlets started posting stories regarding the potential closure of Amsterdam’s Vrije Universiteit’s (VU) autonomous squatted space, De Verrekijker (DV). This conjecture followed the space’s hosting of a controversial panel event which included Jordanian/Palestinian activist Rasmieh Odeh on February 27. A Brief History Coming out of the New University Movement, which spread through Dutch cities during the Maagdenhuis occupation at the Univers
The aging hipsters of Pakhuis de Zwijger, Waag Society and Amsterdam Economic Board are putting on another propaganda festival. Its purpose: to mask the neoliberal destruction of our city. They have done this very effectively for more than a decade now. These are the people behind the marketing campaigns of creative city and smart city that have made Amsterdam dull and truttig. And now they invite us to join them for their next ideological sham: bottom-up city making. City mak
Op 25 april heeft ADM bezwaar gemaakt tegen een omgevingsvergunning die door Koole Maritiem BV is aangevraagd om een sloop- en asbestsaneringsbedrijf op te richten op het ADM terrein. Als deze aanvraag wordt gehonoreerd heeft dat grote consequenties. Voor de ADM community, de vermeende eigenaar Chidda Vastgoed BV en zijn huurder Koole Maritiem BV en tot slot voor de gemeente Amsterdam. Het is onbegrijpelijk dat de aanvraag serieus wordt genomen. Maar nog minder begrijpelijk is de houding v
In a quiet corner of Nieuw-West, just across the A10 from Hoofddorpplein, lies the unpretentious neighborhood Delflandplein. Long known for its worn-looking social housing and windy streets, it is now an area in the process of gentrification. Shiny new apartments cast their shadows onto construction sites, but also something a bit more out-of-the-ordinary: a number of old shipping containers surrounded by planted fields. The grounds are walled with a christmas-tree lined mound of soil, the en
Een dag voor de kraak van Paradiso, dat zijn 50 jarig jubileum recentelijk vierde, opende de psychedelische poptempel Fantasio in 1968 haar deuren aan de Prins Hendrikkade. Al in 1970 maakte Fantasio plaats voor meditatiecentrum De Kosmos. Ook deze bestaat al lang niet meer. Reden waarom oud Fantasiobezoeker en Kosmosmedewerker John Blogg Zaal 100 bereid vroeg vorm te geven aan een viering in stijl. Paul van Dijk, Zaal 100-medewerker en initiatiefnemer Fantasio 2 (2007/2008), nam de uitdaging aa