2020–2022
Community Portal—also known as BAK’s Civic Praxis program—is a steady stream of events, relationships, publications, and field work concerned with making meaningful publics. Its activities are distributed within and outside of the walls of the institution.
Sint Maarten Parade
22 October–10 November 2023
For Sint Maarten Parade 2023, Tools for Action—a non-profit organization that develops artistic interventions for political actions—collaborates with Utrecht-based members of Filipino, Caribbean, and other communities to collectively dream a parade compartment.
Panel Discussion
30 September 2023, 16.30-18.30
Saturday, 30 September, 2023, 16:30–18:30 hrs at BAK, basis actuele kunst, Utrecht Organized by Jina Collective, a Netherlands-based feminist, leftist, anti-capitalist, anti-sexist, and pro-LQBTQIA+ action group that emerged from the Jina Uprising. This event launches a book of translated essays, co-published with BAK, which include some of the first English translations of texts by journalists […]
Exhibition
27 May 2023
For the months of April and May 2023, Ultradependent Public School (UPS) will transform BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, into a schoolhouse featuring many trainings and workshops. Here you can find an overview of all the upcoming events.
Learning
26 May 2023, 00.00-18.00
Blobby is an idiosyncratic typeface by self-taught letterer Crystel Crickx made up of a set of fat shapes, psychedelic and incomplete.
Education Program
21 May, 12.00–19 May, 18.00 2023
In the booming online radio world, terms like community and connection are the first thing you encounter. Yet, with an increasing focus on DJ mixes, video content, and self-promotion, a lot of the experimentation and care that makes radio a beautiful medium disappears. Meanwhile, the cloud is bulging with unlistened recordings. How can we turn this around, or at least make more space for imperfection and consciousness? How can we respond to our connections and reconnect in the process?
Symposium
20-21 May 2023
The Ultrasympathetic Ultratranslation Symposium aims to explore the possibilities that open in the spaces between concepts and practices of language justice and ultratranslation. We are convening a three-day gathering to bring together friends, academics, activists, language workers, social justice workers, cultural workers – individuals and collectivities – whose practices engage the problem of language and communication in everyday life in the context of inequity, racism, discrimination, lack of access, and other impacts of systemic injustice. Through workshops, performances, screenings, presentations, gatherings and conversation, this symposium proposes to open flows of communication and relation, to fail to answer any questions or posit any solid analysis. Rather, we hope to ground a multi-directional, embodied, kinesthetic, vibrant conversation in real world and dream world ideas of language, justice, ultratranslation, and sympathetic systems in order to build resistances that will devour and recreate language from the inside. And to point out the necessity not of language, but of “languages,” in other words, the “many different ways to name our world,” the many ways we can use language to transmute and resist the violence of hegemonic discourses.
Education Program
17 May, 00.00–19 May, 18.00 2023
A training on the ongoing-ness of access making; the temporary status of able-bodied-ness; why the end game is belonging; radical slowness.
Performative
10 May, 12.00–12 May, 18.00 2023
In this dance training, the people will use a one-minute film of their own movement as material for a booklet—a sixteen page signature—that distributes their presence, their gesture, as an act of EQ.
Learning
10 May, 12.00–12 May, 18.00 2023
Vishnu would like to share feminist governance tools (FGT) focused on three of many tiers in community building praxis. FGT is based on the values of equity with an emphasis on creating psychologically safe environments, drawing on the use of consent. Decision-making processes, setting up conflict-positive spaces, and complaint-making as diversity work will form the body of this three-day training. Rooted in Vishnu’s autho-ethnographic practice, this work will explore the power dynamics that impact decision-making processes.
Learning
3 May, 12.00–4 May, 18.00 2023
A bad apology can ruin a friendship, destroy a community, or end a career. In this workshop, we will investigate the impact of apologies on our relationships and our worlds. Why and how do we make apologies? What can giving and receiving apologies teach us about values and integrity? Should you apologize for something you don’t really feel sorry for? We will explore conflict and how we like to be in conflict with others. We will dive into our own boundaries. We will seek to understand how honoring limits becomes an act of building (or freeing) better worlds capable of holding so many, many more of us.
Learning
28 April, 12.00–29 April, 18.00 2023
In this rare masterclass, retired teacher and artist Glenda Martinus teaches participants a thing or two about painting with Microsoft Word. Martinus shares tips, tricks, and secrets on how to use this software to its unexpected potential as a drawing tool. Participants learn how to draw three basic objects—a house, a tree, and an animal—in a seemingly innocent exercise that perhaps contains more layered social commentary. Drawing the worlds we desire does not require expensive tools or education, simply a curiosity to understand how the monster’s tools can topple the house of the master.
Learning
22 April, 11.00–23 April, 17.00 2023
Ultrastudio investigates the act of publishing as a technique to build more habitable communities. It is convened by the BookBinding Workshop of Gerrit Rietveld Academie and Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam (designers Miquel Hervás Gómez and Ott Metusala) together with cultural worker and housing rights advocate Lila Athanasiadou.
Learning
19 April, 12.00–21 April, 18.00 2023
In simplest terms, Ulises is a bookshop and project space dedicated to artists’ books and independent art publications. In truest terms, Ulises is a collection of musings, longings, and assorted activities brought together by a group of friends. This is to say that friendship is the medium, ethos, and structure of Ulises.
Learning
16 April, 16.00–15 April, 18.00 2023
Artist Alfred Marasigan, artist and priest Jason Dy, SJ, curator and death companion Staci Bu Shea, and curator Renan Laru-an are interested in notions of care/nurture and control/subjugation, mortality/death and existence/life, as well as rituals/gestures and mediums/objects. These embodied/tensive experiences are posed for reconsideration in light of the new order/disorder of pandemic time.
Learning
15 April 2023, 11.00-19.00
Violencia Fantasía is an investigation that explores the relationship between desire and the subtle ways in which violence is accommodated in the world we live in. By subtle, we mean those forms of violence that arise from representations, embellished to the point of fantasy, in a society obsessed with producing unimprovable images of itself.
Learning
14 April, 12.00–16 April, 18.00 2023
During this training, we will look into the ancient crafts and symbols of tapestries as well as woodblocks of different geographies. These art forms are surrounded by immaterial cultural heritages—symbolic ornaments, visual languages—that have been undermined by the modernist lens of less-is-more.
Learning
12 April, 12.00–14 April, 18.00 2023
Czar activates his learning object, To Destroy Is To Build (2019-2023), with an ongoing inquiry after monuments that bend to the passage of time. Monuments are generally constructed to commemorate a significant event or person. Their presence is also used to navigate a city, a town, a place. Urban monuments reflect how our ancestors used trees, mountains, and rivers as landmarks to remember their way. What would happen if monuments suddenly moved?
Education Program
12 April 2023, 12.00-18.00
Shapeshifting Sports Camp proposes an inclusive physical education program for schools. It features a series of collective exercises and alternative team sport games to promote empathy and social inclusion. During the training, participants play games that Gabriel Fontana developed in collaboration with Rotterdam-based schools, sport teachers, and their pupils. Composed of new tools, rules, transformable uniforms, and alternative sport fields, the games play around fluid identities. Players are invited into situations where they change teams halfway through the game or where they don’t know at all to which team they belong.
Exhibition
1 April, 14.00–27 May, 23.59 2023
Ultradependent Public School unfolds as the public negotiation of a curriculum to learn what we really need to enact the worlds we really want. Emphasizing study as a radically collective, public labor that lives in-between institutionalized hierarchies, UPS inhabits the edges between formal classrooms and everyday life.
School
10 March, 12.00–11 March, 19.00 2023
A temporary cultural platform for diasporic affects and practice exchanges around the kitchen as a site of study. A two-day program for those interested in working with food activists and agri-cultural workers, preparing and serving food as a way to gather community and enact communal forms of study. Sign up required.
Radio Stream
19 February 2023, 14.00
Mi or Mie in Bahasa Indonesia means “noodles,” while mi in Chinese can mean “rice.” These over-indulgences of critical carbs are the workout diet for the Ultracirculation study group. Now in Yogyakarta, Critical Circulation Mi invites listeners into a guided soundscape with aurations by KUNCI Study Forum and Collective, School for Improper Education, Elaine W. Ho, and Wan Ing Que. While eating, listening, and reading, fieldwork-in-progress looking into the so-called “undocumented period” of the New Order Regime will be broadcast and unfolded in collaboration with participants in SOIE.
Field Work
15 February 2023, 10.00-18.00
A series of practical publishing workshops hosted by an active squat and anarchist social center in Amsterdam and organized by the Bookbinding Studio of Sandberg Instituut/Rietveld Academy and Lila Athanasiadou.
Field Meal
4 February 2023, 13.00-18.00
Using the sancocho (a pan-Latin American soup with no fixed recipe) as a tool for research and encounter, Mercado Lourdes (Bogotá, Colombia) will host and organize a series of field meals. These events activate and connect the multiple affects that have resulted from ongoing research with local producers into the biodiversity of the territory.
Workshop
27 January, 18.30–29 January, 21.00 2023
During these sessions—part of the bASIC aCTIVIST kITCHEN (b.a.k.) program in collaboration with Berend Bombarius, De Voorkamer and BAK, basis voor actuele kunst—we want to collectively explore the topic of setting up community kitchens. Different strategies, tools, methodologies, and contexts are explored to learn more about the challenges and opportunities in the practices and theories of community kitchens.
Workshop
16 December 2022, 15.00-17.00
In all continents, people have built matriarchal cosmologies sustained by complex rituals. In the advent of main modern religions and after centuries of colonizing invasions, the goddesses of antiquity were suppressed by the patriarchal structures that consolidated our era. However, they found ways to speak to us in the language of patterns, melodies, and poems. This workshop uses the voice as a method to reveal the presence of goddesses.
Symposium
24 November 2022, 20.00-21.00
On Thursday, November 24th, 2022, Colored Qollective in collaboration with POCQunity host their third annual symposium, this time focusing on the mental health of queer people of color. The theme of the symposium is Communal Care & Healing.
Workshop
19 November 2022
Unjumbling Our Histories is a two-part workshop on storytelling, collage, and bookmaking—created by artist and writer Maja Irene Bolier—with a purpose to learn and share stories in a safe and fun environment; a space for empathy, learning, and understanding.
Gathering
28 October 2022, 19.00-22.00
Yallah Sabaya is an evening where dance and music connect women from different backgrounds. The purpose is to connect through movement, rather than verbal communication, in a safe and welcoming environment.
Parade Compartment
16 October–11 November 2022
A series of hands-on puppet making, storytelling, and protest chant workshops, building towards a collective performance for the Sint Maarten parade in Utrecht.
Conversation
13 October 2022, 19.00-21.00
Perspectives is a program by De Voorkamer to foster inclusivity and acceptance at by creating a safe space for people of all backgrounds to engage in dialogue, share opinions, and develop ideas around topical issues that affect everyone. This edition, hosted by BAK Community Portal, focuses on the theme of sustainability.
Screening
7 October 2022, 19.00-21.45
Screening of the documentary Ushiku (2021) by Thomas Ash, followed by a panel discussion with the director and members from activist groups Migrante, SEHAQ and Papaya Kuir. Hosted by BAK Community Portal and organised by the initiative Asian Movie Night.
Community Portal
5 October 2022, 19.00-21.00
The Community Dinner is a communal dinner for ‘Utrechters’, whether they are new to the city or simply looking to get to know their local community better. Chefs from ‘De Voorkamer’ community prepare a free dinner of vegan, cultural cuisine.
