A public programme and exhibition hosted by damdam – a collective of collectives brought together by de Appel Curatorial Programme, & Sandberg Instituut temporary master Lumbung Practice,
Building a House Without Bricks consists of a public programme and exhibition hosted by damdam – a collective of collectives brought together by de Appel Curatorial Programme, Sandberg Instituut temporary master Lumbung Practice, and Gudskul, Jakarta – which seeks to cultivate methods of collective organisation in times of crisis. The festival is formulated around three central questions: How to organise? How to distribute labour and resources? How to share what we produce?
The exhibition at de Appel is the second act, after a three day public programme at OT301 in June, where we invite you into the house, turning to the physical and material structures inside. Acknowledging the limits of an exhibition, we focus on objects and their potential for resource through transvestment (transferring resources from one value system to another). The objects are commissioned by the different collectives within damdam, who shared instructions to build a house that reflects current needs in sustaining collective practice. With these objects, we build a house that can transvest resources into each collective’s local context, using a framework that balances production budget and fees with their needs.
Building a House Without Bricks seeks to create a house for our collectives through these and objects, to continue practicing, gathering, and learning from each other. Through this festival, we celebrate the learnings we have gathered over the past two years together in the Lumbung Practice programme, and share them with our wider community.
During the opening, one of the exhibited works, a clay oven, will be activated as the centre of an ongoing ritual gathering. Visitors are invited to gather around the fire, share stories, prepare bread together, and take part in a collective moment of making and eating.
The digital programme extends the exhibition into an ongoing online space hosted on lumbung.space, bringing together films (Film Pot and Footage Therapy), interviews (Rice to Meet You!), radio transmissions, reading sessions and knowledge sharing (Low Budget, High Concept), archival materials from the two-year process of forming Lumbung Practice (Rumours and Humours) in Indonesia (Six-Pack) and Amsterdam (damdam), alongside contributions from participating collectives. It functions as a shared infrastructure for staying connected across different localities and temporalities.
This public programme is a collaboration between participants of the Lumbung Practice programme in Amsterdam and Kunstverein Aughrim Creative Producer Programme in Ireland, which is a curatorial production framework focused on artistic accompaniment, collective learning, and building support structures for contemporary art practices.
Developed through exchange between the participants of both programmes, the gathering will unfold through two artistic presentations by artists Avril Corroon and Katie Watchorn, on questions of living conditions, infrastructure and the politics of place. This will be followed by a panel conversation with the Kunstverein Aughrim Creative Producers on sustaining curatorial and artistic practices through collective organisation and of care and hospitality. ‣ More info & tickets
You are warmly invited to four days of listening, gathering, collective unlearning, and fundraising at de Appel (9 July) and Lola Lieven (10–12 July), in solidarity with communities across West Asia resisting genocide, settler colonialism, war, and mass violence. The programme brings together documentary films, collective reading, performance, and a book launch, tracing histories and voices from Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Rojava, Artsakh, Iran and Turkey. It includes a collective reading by Reading Counterpower, the book launch of Stories of Resilience: Salah and People of Gaza Between Life and Death by Salah Akram, a dialogue performance by Ehsan Fardjadniya and a film screening of THE MELANCHOLY OF THIS USELESS AFTERNOON Chapter I and II (2022) by Dina Mimi. ‣ More info
📌 Wednesday 12.08.2026, 14:00–18:00
Taking place in the exhibition space, this workshop approaches the objects in the exhibition as situated expressions of different temporal realities. Participants explore how different localities operate within distinct rhythms of time, shaped by urgency, stability, labour conditions, political contexts, and local calendars. Participants are invited to trace how different understandings of time, continuity, urgency, and collective life become embedded within the objects and instructions, revealing multiple temporalities and cosmologies of organising across different localities. Through collective mapping and reflection, we examine how these uneven temporal shape collaboration, and relations within translocal solidarity networks. ‣ More info & tickets
