Edition X: Body as Memory

If I Can’t Dance is proud to present the 2026 programme of Edition X: Body as Memory (2025–2028). Across new commissions, workshops, screenings and events, the programme considers how memory is carried and transmitted across human and non-human bodies. Engaging questions of access, justice, and embodiment, the projects in this Edition approach performance as a site through which social and political imaginaries can be conjured and reimagined.

We begin in early June (June 5–7) with a three-day screening of PLOT (2026) by artist Josephine Sales at LAB111. Commissioned by If I Can’t Dance as part of the artistic research programme access: practices and habits, initiated in collaboration with Askeaton Contemporary Arts (Limerick) and Bulegoa z/b (Bilbao), PLOT (2026) is a site-specific video work made with a camera on wheels and produced in relation to the architecture of If I Can’t Dance’s home: the former medical theatre of the Women’s Clinic at the Wilhelmina Gasthuis Hospital. The weekend presentation will also feature Car by Jason Hirata, and the launch of There’s a Tunnel Under Ballybrit Business Park (June 7), a publication by writer and curator Iarlaith Ní Fheorais, commissioned by Askeaton Contemporary Arts as part of access: practices and habits. On this occasion, Ní Fheorais will be in conversation with artist, writer, and musician Rouzbeh Shadpey and artist Josephine Sales.

From June 20 to July 11, we continue our summer programme with Frictional Conversations—The Script, a new iteration of an ongoing, multi-layered project by artist/researcher yasmine eid-sabbagh. Through live broadcasting events and an extensive public programme, the project continues a twenty-five-year process of (counter-)archiving and engagement with a repository of photographs from Burj al-Shamali, a Palestinian refugee camp in southern Lebanon. The project is centered on the script for an experimental radio show developed by eid-sabbagh together with musician and composer Sary Moussa and her collaborators in Burj al-Shamali. The script is performed live across four broadcasting events, followed by artist talks with eid-sabbagh, DJ Lynnée Denise, Francisca Khamis Giacoman, and Ola Hassanain. Outside these events, the space remains open for workshops, reading circles, and intergenerational activities with Book Block Brigades, Reading Vigil for Palestine, Learning Palestine, O(o)yster Mums, Tidal Studies, Sobhi Khatib/BeSaraha, and shy*play. The symposium Rhythms of Anti-colonial Struggles: Radio, Archives and the Transmission of Solidarities, convened by eid-sabbagh in dialogue with scholar Layal Ftouni, and co-organized with de Appel on June 21, further expands on the questions raised by the project.

Looking ahead to the fall, we will host the final two workshop sessions of Ferals and Ruderals: History Through the Cracks with artist Milena Bonilla (July 17 and September 19), an ongoing series examining the wild plant life surrounding our site, a former hospital and plague house. The autumn programme will also include a screening of Crisis Acres by Tom K Kemp (September 16),  addressing the crisis of the healthcare system; a performative reading and public discussion based on The Trial, a publication chronicling Rossella Biscotti’s seminal fifteen-year project on the trial against Autonomia Operaia and the criminalization of dissident thought (September 26, in collaboration with the Rijksakademie); and a new iteration of Chandra Frank’s series Tidal Gatherings, featuring a new performance and workshop on mud, clay, and migration by artist Lina Bravo Mora (October 10–11).

We close the year with the second and final chapter of YOU are VARIATIONS (October 30–November 8), presenting the friendship and artistic collaboration between artists Anchan/Anna Daučíková & Christina Della Giustina. Co-commissioned with Vleeshal Center for Contemporary Art in Middelburg, which hosted the first exhibition from January to March 2026, this second iteration introduces the artists’ personal archives and performance work.

Last, but not least, in the fall we will be starting our new two-year temporary MA Programme Phantom Scores, led by curator and writer Eva Posas at the Sandberg Instituut.

If you are in—or passing through—Amsterdam in the coming months, we warmly invite you to join us!

Anik Fournier, Sara Giannini, and Annick Kleizen
Co-directors of If I Can’t Dance

Edition X: Body as Memory is supported by the Mondriaan Fund and by het Cultuurfonds, thanks to the Stoephuis Fonds. Access: practices and habits is co-funded by the European Union. Frictional Conversations—The Script was commissioned as part of the Consortium Commissions—a project initiated by Mophradat. The presentation is further supported by the AFK (Amsterdam Fund for the Arts) and the DOEN Foundation.

[Visual Description: An illuminated green ceiling-mounted sign using the form of an emergency EXIT sign displays the word “PLOT” in bold uppercase lettering alongside a directional arrow.]