A Site of Study — Sustaining the Otherwise: Practicing Freedom and Refusal
Donderdag 9. april om 19:00 - 21:00
Metro54, Amsterdam
On Thursday April 9th, as part of our ongoing exhibition, we’ll be hosting a Site of Study with contributions by scholars, thinkers and cultural workers: Selene Wendt, Sasha Huber, Jackie Karuti, Amal Alhaag & more.
Sustaining the Otherwise: Practicing Freedom and Refusal is a collective and ongoing inquiry into how we might live, think and create otherwise, within and against the enduring structures of coloniality. The exhibition features works by artists whose research and artistic practices offer multiple entrance points for rethinking restitution.
Within this context, we offer a Site of Study as an opportunity to explore some foundational questions: What does it mean to practice freedom and refusal today? What do we want? What do we say? Which stories, dreams, and forms of ancestral knowledge effectively sustain artists, activists, communities and other troublemakers? Together we zoom into these questions and possibilities of Practicing Freedom and Refusal.
Drinks and snacks will be provided.
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🔥Date: Thursday 9th April
🔥Time: 18:00 - 21:00
🔥Location: Westerdoksdijk 597,
🔥Please RSVP
While restitution over the last two decades has been largely framed as the return of objects, Practicing Freedom and Refusal stretches the conversation beyond the object. It questions what else has been lost alongside and how an object stolen from time could ever rectify the loss of labor, knowledge and history. This exhibition shifts the focus toward dismantling and re-addressing restitution within speculative practices, centering African and diasporic artists who engage memory, inheritance, and survival as ongoing processes.
Sustaining the Otherwise is a multi-locational research and artistic project about restitution, reparation and transformation that offers a space for artists, curators, and scholars to be in dialogue and to explore the topic of restitution in relation to both material and immaterial culture, and an opportunity to exchange knowledge and to expand upon existing networks. Focusing on artistic practices, from February 2026 until Summer 2027, the 2026/2027 program features a multilocational exhibition and artistic program,includes gatherings, artistic programming, exhibitions, artist publications, residencies, publications and the creation of an accessible online and physical archive. Throughout the program and its afterlife, we will present a series of program threads that are organized alongside guided by themes including such as the Earth as a Wayfinder, Becoming at One with the World, Unruly Knowledge, and Transformative Ecosystems in Practice. Each program focuses on a particular set of questions and concepts that offer imaginative, artistic, and community-based ways approaches thatto stretch the notion of restitution beyond the cultural heritage object by centering the artistic practices, community work, research and imagination that is necessary as we seek to also foreground the importance of epistemic restitution.
Metro54 • Westerdoksdijk 597, 1013 BX Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, Nederland
