Community Portal: fall 2024

Community Portal, the civic praxis program of BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, proudly announces our fall 2024 activities—a flow of events, relationships, publications, and field work developed around the needs of, and with, our publics and communities. This long-term research stream slips between actively generating its own content and offering support to existing structures in and outside of BAK. The program is shaped by the pressures that arise when grassroots collectives, autonomous organizations, (loosely) organized teams, and civil society groups require support from an institution and vice versa.

Community Portal conducts applied research—bringing theory closer to practice—on collective forms of organization and labor. It does so always in collaboration: with groups already organized (or wanting to collectivize) for social, cultural, and political advocacies alongside research accomplices who apply their practice and networks to the institution, retooling it from within.

Community Portal gathers around four themes: access/belonging, convened by art historian and cultural worker Alejandro Navarrete with the accompliceship of language justice advocate Jen/Eleana Hofer and disability rights researcher Sandra Lange; circulation, convened by grey-lit undercommoner Clara Balaguer; endurance/affordance, convened by artist Jeanne van Heeswijk; and hospitality, convened by anarcho-organizer, chef, and anthropologist Grace Lostia with the accompliceship of food activist Berend Bombarius.

Find a selection of our recent and forthcoming activities below.

Talent Schuift Aan
September 21, 2024
A culture party by De Zwarte Tafel, an Utrecht collective of Black Caribbean artists and cultural workers. Featuring music, dance, spoken word, a pop-up market, a flash exhibition, and a panel of young Black artists speaking of their experiences within white educational institutions. This community-led program has fermented, slowly, over two years of conscious exchange between De Zwarte Tafel and BAK.

Field Meal #5: Open Kitchen Weekender
October 17–19, 2024
A three-day meetup for community kitchens, food sovereignty activists, and any other bodies for whom food and fermentation are tools for collective action. Guided by a basic question—how to set up a community kitchen—friends of the Field Meal Network present workshops, discussion and cooking sessions, fundraisers, a student exhibition, and performances from Utrecht’s underground music scene. This event culminates a year’s worth of field visits to kitchen comrades in Utrecht, Barcelona, and Berlin. Gathered learnings from these road trips are published as a Field Meal Field Notebook.

Co-convened by Grace Lostia and Berend Bombarius, accompanied by Berlin Migrant Strikers Kitchen (Giulia Orlandi) and core research partners: SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin (Daniellis Hernández and Renan Laru-an) and La Cuina del MACBA, Barcelona (Marina Monsonis).

Yallah Sabaya
October 4, 2024
A women-only dance party, recurring at BAK since 2019, co-convened with Utrecht community space De Voorkamer and newcomer support organization Welkom in Utrecht.

Institutional Fitness Plan (modules I–II)
Throughout 2024

Language Justice—Jen/Eleana Hofer: Language justice worker Jen/Eleana Hofer holds a series of trainings for BAK’s team and network of language service providers, taking BAK’s existing public program as a testing ground for skilling the institution. Gathered learnings are made public as a Language Justice Manual for Professional Beginners.

Belonging—Sandra Lange: Belonging—Sandra Lange: Disability rights advocate Sandra Lange facilitates sessions with BAK’s staff as a proto-practice of witnessing: identifying to dismantle the effects of internalized ableism on personal and institutional bodies. Gathered learnings are circulated as an (audio) archive of intimate field conversations.

Gender and Sexuality in the Caribbean: A Confluence of Art and Queer Sovereignties
December 1, 2024
This symposium unfolds around a table reading of the script of Marival (1996) by Felix de Rooy, a landmark play representing queer Caribbean experience in the Dutch colonial shadow. Themes emerging from this literary provocation are expanded in discussions, lectures, and other rituals. Co-convened by Alejandro Navarrete and Dr. Wigbertson Julian Isenia.

The activities of BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht are made possible with the financial support of the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science and the City Council, Utrecht.