APRiCot Garden 2026: If Not Here, Then Where?

On the occasion of Gabriëlle Schleijpen’s completion of her tenure as director (2002–26) of the Dutch Art Institute (DAI), and celebrating her legacy, the second edition of APRiCot Garden 2026 will revisit the enduring questions posed by one of DAI’s founding projects. Here as the Centre of the World sought to locate the pulse of global power and resistance; its afterlife has shaped the school’s trajectory.

That trajectory has brought us precisely here, to this point, to this gathering, at this moment. It is from this vantage—shaped by years of collective practice and shared questioning—that we now come together to insist that belonging is forged through shared production, struggle, and infrastructure.

We come together to refuse the neoliberal logic that thrives on shifting systemic problems onto individual shoulders. To reject frameworks that treat the psychological endurance of the oppressed as beautiful, redemptive, or a spiritual currency; to refuse narratives that alchemize trauma into strength or offer hollow uplift. 

We come together to reject blind, dogmatic class-reductionism. To refuse the argument that treats race and gender as mere “distractions” or simple byproducts of capitalism. To instead insist they are material forces—forces that dictate whose labor is stolen or devalued before they even walk through the door of a workplace.

Where we belong is not determined by blood/soil or territorial borders; it is seized at the point of production, where material life is made, moved, or maintained. We reject the lure of the anachronistic as a site of resistance, and refuse to ground community on identity. Instead, we forge a “composition”—a strategic alignment of inhabitants bound by co-dependence in a material ecosystem, united by practical interrelation and mutual necessity.

If Not Here, Then Where? Making Our Home in Shared Struggle extends the legacy of Here as the Centre of the World, cultivating forms of collectivity and intimacy that break with parochial notions of community.

Our two-day public symposium will carry forward the 1906 General Jewish Labour Bund's insight that arguing and leafleting are not merely tools for spreading pre-existing knowledge but the actual sites where revolutionary knowledge is forged. We hold that these buried futures are precisely what must be reactivated—not as nostalgia, but as a critical inheritance, the very ground on which a politics worthy of our genocidal times must be built. 

Together with Gabriëlle Schleijpen we maintain our shared commitment to building a home in the friction of shared struggle, and to the work that continues to define our path. 

Conveners: Ana Teixeira Pinto &  Gabriëlle Schleijpen.

If Not Here, Then Where? Making Our Home in Shared Struggle consists of talks, conversations and performances, and is paired with an exhibition and the launch of the publication A Cut Through the Screen: Struggles' Reverberations in Cinema.

Contributions to the symposium: Angela Harutyunyan, Aziza Harmel & Bassam El Baroni, Edwin Nasr, Iliada Charalambous & Jeanne van Heeswijk, Leire Vergara, Marwa Arsanios, Noah Brehmer & Monika Janulevičiūtė, Pary El-Qalqili, Quinsy Gario, Rana Hamadeh, Sami Khatib, Teresa Koloma Beck, Tirdad Zolghadr among others. DAI Friends & Alumni Grant collective and Kiosk Rotterdam are present throughout.

Exhibition with spatial dramaturgy by Elisa Giuliano and works by Afrang Nordlöf Malekian, Alaa Abu Asad, Alexandra Martens Serrano, Baha Görkem Yalim, Derek di Fabio & Dalia Maini, Duruo Wang, Foundland Collective (Lauren Alexander & Ghalia Elsrakbi), Giulia Crispiani & Golrokh Nafisi, Hasan Özgur Top, Ioli Kavakou, Leon Filter & Ian Clewe, Livio Casanova & Clara Saito, marce norbert hörler & Kari Leigh Rosenfeld, Sepideh Behrouzian among others.