1. Stunde Null Als je op Koningsdag om tien uur ’s ochtends door de binnenstad van Amsterdam fietste, was het onwezenlijk stil. Op een gegeven moment kon je zelfs het gevoel krijgen dat dit ongeveer het beeld moest zijn van een stad waar een neutronenbom was ontploft. De neutronenbom was eind jaren zeventig het schrikbeeld van de No Future-generatie: een bom die de meeste gebouwen en andere infrastructuur intact liet, maar wel alle levende wezens doodde; die bom is gelukkig nooit echt in
Maia Matches - social political comic artist since 2006 Click on the right (or left) side of the image to see the next (or previous) one.
The tip top 5 is a small selection of books and/or magazines. We will share these titles with you but you’ll have to do the judging of the books yourself. Tips and links to releases are always welcome. Sonic Acts Academy 2020 Edited by Mirna Belina Publisher: Sonic Acts Press Release date: 02-2020 Price: €6 Sonic Acts Academy took its cue from inspiring artistic research, fuelled by the most exciting contemporary artists and thinkers from around the globe. Thi
The global crisis of COVID-19 forces everyone to rethink their standing and status. From small to large scale businesses, intrepid entrepreneurs, office workers, civil servants, arts, crafts and creative visionaries, to those with zero-hour contracts and the rapidly increasing number of unemployed... and the list goes on. Absolutely everyone is being given the time to press ‘pause’ on their fast paced lives, yet while for some this transition will be a time of happy changes, for many
On March 13th, the municipality decided to indefinitely postpone the eviction of the Garage, an empty parking lot in Kraaiennest, Zuid-Oost where around 80 undocumented men live. The eviction was initially planned for March 15th. On April 1st, the municipality of Amsterdam issued a long-awaited statement on potential solutions for the Garage inhabitants. Not surprisingly, what they offered was merely a night shelter that could barely accommodate half of the Garage’s inhabitants, whilst put
The last time the ‘content contributors’ of Amsterdam Alternative had a get-together at the end of January 2020 (the last of the ‘physical meetings’ as it turned out) to discuss the course of things to come for the zine, I opted to write something about myself and how I tried to re- main level-headed as an ‘artist’ who aspired to do more writing, music recordings and film editing all from his home... The deadline for that issue passed me by because I have m
De wereld was hard op weg naar een handels-, energie- of klimaatcrisis. We zagen ze komen, het was slechts de vraag wanneer en welke crisis het eerste plaats zou vinden. Wachten op de crash om vervolgens met crisis management en veel noodmaatregelen de zaak proberen te redden. Maar toen kwam een andere crisis. Menselijk contact is gevaarlijk. We lopen in een boog om iedereen heen. Elk mens een mogelijke corona haard. Is dat angst of is dat nuchter omgaan met de situatie? Hoe nestel
‘Dit is de frontlinie,’ zei ze, ‘dit is de strijd die zich de rest van de eeuw over de hele planeet verder gaat ontvouwen. Schrijf dat maar op.’ En weg keek ze. Het moet een uur of negen ’s avonds geweest zijn. Het was al donker, de straatverlichting stond aan. We liepen met tien journalisten tussen hoge gebouwen zoals je ze in vele miljoenensteden ziet. Iedereen had een geel hesje om, sommigen van ons met helmen en gasmaskers op, en allemaal met camera. Handzame ca
Picked with care but you can do the judging yourself. Tips and links to releases are always welcome (music@amsterdamalternative.nl). For music listening go to our Spotify page or Soundcloud page for DJ mixes. Adult. Perception is/as/of Deception Label: Dais Release date: 10-04-2020 Genre: Electro Format: Digital, Vinyl With the rampant sense of emptiness on the minds of many these days, there continues to be few attempts at scoring these common, u
For Sama tells the story of Waad al-Kateab, a young Syrian journalist, resigned to stay in rebel-held Eastern Aleppo. Through Waad’s eyes – the documentary is a collection of clips she filmed over the years of the Battle of Aleppo, we discover the daily life of civilians in a city under siege by Russian-backed Assad forces. Starting in 2011 at university, Waad first films what looked like a student uprising, calling for democracy and the fall of Assad’s regime. Then, we witn
I miss bars, crowded concerts, dance clubs, and even sometimes University. But in these hard and weird times, the lack of physical contact is the thing that I most struggle to adapt to. From the start of what felt like an episode of Black Mirror, observing this shift in our culture of touching has brought me to many reflections. How do people cope with this lack of physical touch? Once this is all over, in a post-pandemic world, are people going to be afraid to touch one another? One morning
In an attempt to make sense of the current situation in a positive spirit, the Participatory Podcast Team (four students that decided to stay anonymous) gave life to a platform through which to share experiences and reflections. The hosts set a weekly topic, and people can submit their thoughts on that subject, as a recording, in any language they like. Each week one chapter will be released with a plethora of different voices from all around the world, and the topic for the next week is announc
Het zijn rare tijden en er zijn veel zorgen met name over geld. Sinds kort ben ik aangesloten bij de beweging van #nietmijnschuld en wij wilden ook voordat de Corona-crisis er was, het leenstelsel afschaffen en de basisbeurs weer terug invoeren. Nu wordt er door de minister van Onderwijs, Cultuur en Wetenschap (Ingrid van Engelshoven, D66) gesuggereerd dat studenten die nu in financiële problemen komen dat zij meer geld kunnen bijlenen via DUO. Wat hierbij vergeten wordt is dat sinds de inv
De Amsterdamse alternatieve wereld is in zijn fysieke vorm tijdelijk gesloten. Niet opgelegd door een wrede dictatuur maar door een besmettelijk en zeer gevaarlijk virus dat de wereld in zijn greep heeft. We hebben een aantal panden gesproken over de huidige situatie en de mogelijke gevolgen van deze crisis voor hun pand/organisatie. 1. Everybody still healthy? OCCII:“Voor zover we weten is iedereen gezond en niet ernstig getroffen.’ Cavia: ‘Everybody healthy’ OT30
Website Sinds het begin van de coronacrisis en de lockdowns in Nederland en andere landen worden op Wereldbrand (www.wereldbrand.nl) de interessantste stukken uit de internationale media over de crisis en de nasleep daarvan in vertaling gepubliceerd. Op de site staan inmiddels een stuk of twintig stukken van onder meer de filosofen Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Zizek, Bruno Latour en Achille Mbembe, en van auteurs als Mike Davis, Evgeny Morozov en Mariana Mazzucato. Sommige stukken worden doorgeplaat
Does climate change affect all of us? Yes indeed. But never all of us in the same way. And while most European climate activists are concerned with ‘the future of all of us’, they forget that for some people climate change is -and has been- an issue for quite some time. And guess what, the people hit hardest are probably not the ones reading this article right now. The concept of environmental racism was coined in the United States of the early 1980’s. First used by activist
In our little, squared, rooms And in within these and other borders, We lie, motionless And in our smaller, squared, views and in within these and other modern mental frames, – our self-centred, systematizing and purposive modern mental frames – we wait, indifferent hit by the daylight, our windows as frames, our favourite (urban) landscapes stretch their limbs slowly awakening by a long-awaited sun. while at night, while walking lonely as a cloud, the wind brea
The Corona crisis is turning life upside down, or inside out, and will change the world as we know it. Still, I never want to forget what happened in 2019 in my hometown Hong Kong. Mid December, while in Wuhan, China, the first people started to die from their long infections, I returned to Hong Kong amidst the aftermath of mass marches on the central business district. The events, beginning with the anti-extradition bill protest, marked six months of turmoil that fractured the city. As is us
Het corona-drama van de afgelopen weken heeft in één klap duidelijk gemaakt wat in onze maatschappij van levensbelang is en wat niet. Ineens beseffen we hoe belangrijk goede gezondheidszorg is, evenals wetenschappelijk onderzoek en buurtstructuren waar mensen elkaar kennen en (dus) voor elkaar zorgen. En zoveel andere zaken die eerder veronachtzaamd werden, omdat ze in het moderne economische politieke denken als ‘waardeloos’ waren weggezet. Ook de kwetsbaarheid van
What’s all this about the Netherland’s being ‘reclaimed from the sea’? It is actually a myth that the country emerged victoriously out of salty sea water. Cycling down Amstelveenseweg, you’re not 20 feet below sea level because ‘the humans removed the sea’, you’re under sea level because the water was extracted from the sponge-like peat ecosystem that was once there, and that meant that the ground level lowered. For those who don’t know wh
Every two months we organise an evening in which we discuss a particular book. Books include non-fiction about current social and political matters as well as new and older literary texts. The sessions are open to everyone and free of charge. In the next session we’ll discuss and compare two books again: The Stranger by Albert Camus and The Meursault investigation by Kamel Daoud. In Camus’s well-known story, an ordinary man, Meursault, senselessly kills an unnamed Arab. Het is tri
misschien dat dit een virus is waar niemand resistent voor wordt, een modern google, of een facebook iets dat je ongezien besluipt, je overneemt en je dan verdrinkt tot je geest zich gewonnen geeft - zo waren er nog meer gedachten, in je zwarte badjas, die je de hele dag al aanhad, zat je onderuitgezakt bij het donkere raam, het scherm maakte je korzelig maar misschien kwam dat door deze tijd of je was ziek, ik wilde het niet vragen ik miste ons bier en de sport, dingen die ge
With COVID-19 bursting across the globe, anti-Chinese sentiments emerged. These were particularly evident at the outbreak of the pandemic with the upsurge of reports of verbal and physical assault on the news and media. The strength of these feelings is hard to gauge. What could be the reasons behind this discrimination? At the beginning of the pandemic, many were the Chinese and East-Asians facing discrimination. In Asia, the hashtag #ChineseDon’tCometoJapan had been trending on Twitte
In a matter of days, as our living community shrank from twelve people to four, flights from Amsterdam reached four different continents . For me, it was a sad, abrupt, and surreal goodbye. Despite messages everywhere to stay home, to stay put where you are, for those of us not quite home, the messages were different. Living in international student housing, I witnessed how national governments quickly warned citizens living abroad to return home now or accept the prospect of being stuck indefin
Every issue we publish a tip top 5 of documentaries and films that we think are worth watching.This issues list has been created by Cinema of the Dam’d (cinema in the OT301). If available we share the content on our Youtube channel. Un homme qui dort Director: Bernard Queysanne Writer: Georges Perec Release: 1974 Topic: Social isolation Where to find it: it’s on Youtube in it’s entirety with English subtitles Based on a novel by Georges Perec, this is a beau