Join us at de Appel in October and November to participate in playshops, dialogue sessions, workshops, or to visit our current exhibition CaccHho CucchhA by Mercedes Azpilicueta: the Playshops accompanying the exhibition kick off during 24 Uur Zuid, with session led by Mercedes Azpilicueta, Gļeb(s) Maiboroda, Lina Bravo Mora and Anna Klas. We welcome Palestinian Film Festival Amsterdam at de Appel for a series of seminars and dialogue sessions, facilitated by Ahmed Masoud, Isshaq Albarbary, Carol Mansour and Muna Khalidi, Amal Alhaag, Yara Yuri Safadi and Hypatia Vourloumis. Archive Hours, organised together with Archival Consciousness, kicks off a second series of workshops with guest speakers Melisa Cenik, Janou Munnik, Ami Clarke and Lozana Rossenova. Last but not least, we welcome interim Artistic Director Eszter Szakács, who will cover for Lara Khaldi during her maternity leave.
Our current solo exhibition for children and adults by Mercedes Azpilicueta, CaccHho CucchhA, will be activated through children’s free play and a series of artist-led playshops. These sessions are facilitated by Mercedes Azpilicueta herself, Antonella Fittipaldi, Anna Klas, Lina Bravo Mora, Raoni Muzho Saleh, Gļeb(s) Maiboroda and Vere van der Veen, and will explore the exhibition through storytelling, , weaving, sound-making, and planting. Since this is a child centered exhibition, rather than being guided or instructed, children will be accompanied, with activities adapted to their collective rhythms, needs, and desires. The playshops are open to children aged 4–12. Adults are expected to participate in the play activities.
The Playshops are open on Saturday 11 October (as part of 24 Uur Zuid), Saturday 25 October, Wednesday 29 October, Saturday 8 November, Wednesday 12 November and Saturday 22 November. ‣ More info and register here!
This year’s series of dialogue sessions, as part of Palestinian Film Festival Amsterdam, opens with a conversation between novelist, poet and playwright Ahmed Masoud and visual artist Isshaq Albarbary (joining online), which explores connections across literature, theater, cinema, and the visual arts. Starting from Ahmed's questions, "Where is cultural resistance now? Where was it before?", the discussion offers a reassessment of the terms of artistic and cultural resistance today, placing renewed emphasis on the importance of imagination in representing pasts, presents and futures. Ahmed and Isshaq will be joined in conversation by festival house moderator Yara Yuri Safadi. ‣ More info and tickets
In the second of this year’s dialogue sessions, we welcome filmmakers Carol Mansour and Muna Khalidi for a conversation with artisan and entrepreneur Belinda Idriss on embroidery, textile tradition, and embodied knowledge transmission. Carol, Muna, and Belinda will be joined in conversation by curator and researcher Amal Alhaag.
This session follows a Thursday night screening of Mansour’s 2017 film Stitching Palestine, and is part of a tatreez trajectory within the festival programme, which highlights the importance of this cultural tradition as one of the virtual threads materially connecting Palestinian life in Palestine and across the Diaspora. Alongside the screening and dialogue session, festival audiences can also join for a Sunday afternoon hands-on workshop. ‣ More info and tickets
Hosted in collaboration with the Palestinian Film Festival Amsterdam (PFFA) and de Appel, this seminar aims to transgress the inherited categories of Western cinema studies. In conversation with Hypatia Vourloumis, a performance theorist working across anticolonial, feminist, critical race and queer theory, this session will think through practices of archiving in the present as resistance to normalization and erasure. As we navigate the ongoing ruination of Western institutions and attune to the media production of those actively defying genocide, we will discuss archiving as a collective resistant act, and investigate strategies and tactics of history and memory making in our cracking present as we move towards a future we materially insist upon. ‣ More info and reservations
de Appel is happy to invite you to a second series of Archive Hours: three archiving workshops facilitated by Mariana Lanari, Nell Donkers and invited guest speakers: Melisa Cenik, Janou Munnik, Ami Clarke and Lozana Rossenova. In these stand-alone workshops we share archiving methods with fellow artists, researchers and archivists working within cultural institutions, community spaces, social movements, artist archives and research archives. Each Archive Hours session consists of an introduction by Mariana Lanari, followed by a presentation of a study case by an invited guest, and provides practical guidance for the participating archives. Afterwards we slide into Archive Happy Hours with soup and drinks until 19:00, to share our love and predicaments in our archiving practices. ‣ More info and register here!
Curator Eszter Szakács will be covering for Artistic Director Lara Khaldi on her maternity leave for the months to come. In 2023, Eszter curated the exhibition Dóra Maurer – SUMUS – We Are Together at de Appel, and in 2024 she returned to de Appel to launch Solidarity Must Be Defended, a publication she co-edited with Naeem Mohaiemen.
Eszter has taken part in various group-based forms of organizing and curating, such as the Curator of the Guest Programme of the 41st EVA International, made in collaboration with the EVA Team (2025); as a curatorial team member in OFF-Biennale Budapest’s second (2017) and third edition (2021), as well as in OFF-Biennale’s participation at documenta fifteen as a lumbung member (2022). She is a member of the IMAGINART research group as a PhD candidate at ASCA of the University of Amsterdam and a Tutorial Collective member of the Lumbung Practice temporary master’s.
Learning Palestine offers a collection of online and printed essays that are essential readings for a comprehensive understanding of the Palestinian struggle. Authored by diverse writers from various backgrounds, these essays span different periods and cover a range of topics. You can support them by getting involved in the mission to localise the knowledge about Palestine in different languages around the world and by printing and distributing the pamphlets yourself. ‣ Learn more
Visit de Appel to see the CaccHho CucchhA, a scenographic exhibition by Mercedes Azpilicueta that treats play as invention, disobedience, and commons making. Commissioned by de Appel, the project unfolds as an immersive ecosystem of modular sculptural costumes, play platforms and a large tapestry, activated through an ongoing series of workshops with children, families, and invited collaborators. CaccHho CucchhA is part of de Appel’s long-term commitment to embedded art and mutual learning, as well as hosting children and caregivers into the centre of artistic life and rethinking what behaviors, and whose tempos are supported in cultural spaces. ‣ Learn more
