Afro-Eclecticism is a dynamic cultural platform exploring the intersections of African heritage and global influences through food, music, visual art, design, and fashion. Each edition brings together artists, musicians, and chefs to examine how culture is continuously shaped through movement, exchange, and adaptation.
This edition presents Common Unity: Adaptation, an evening centred on the evolving notion of home. Through a communal dinner, contemporary art, music, and a participatory workshop, the programme invites audiences to reflect on the ways identity is preserved, transformed, and reimagined across cultures and generations.
The event is open to all visitors, with an exhibition, DJ sets, and a bar serving drinks throughout the evening. A limited-capacity dinner and workshop programme (25 participants) offers a more intimate engagement with the evening’s central theme.
Common Unity: Adaptation explores how food changes in response to place. Within diaspora communities, traditional ingredients, cooking methods, and tools are not always readily available, giving rise to new approaches that preserve cultural memory while responding to a different environment. Through substitution, improvisation, and creativity, adaptation becomes a way of drawing parallels between origin and context, allowing the concept of home to evolve without losing its roots.
The four-course menu reflects this exploration, featuring an avocado, mango (and gambas) salad, alloco (fried plantain) with tomato sauce and attiéké (cassava couscous), served with a choice of fried cod or chicken alongside a fresh salad, followed by sorbet and bissap, a hibiscus infusion enjoyed across West Africa.
Throughout the evening, music will be provided by vinyl DJ Koye Taylor and Stillblue, whose selections create a beautiful landscape that complements the programme.
The exhibition features work by Rayaan Ettagdouini, who recently graduated from HKU University of the Arts Utrecht. In I’ve Made a Home of This, the artist reflects on the ongoing search for home as something not inherited but continually constructed. Combining textile prints, metal sculptures, and video installation, the work considers identity as a process that unfolds through repetition, resilience, and lived experience. Additional work by Fama Niang will also be presented.
Niang will also lead Archiving & Collaging, a participatory workshop exploring collage-making and media archiving as intertwined practices of preservation and reinterpretation. By working with found imagery and personal narratives, participants are invited to consider how memory can be retained while simultaneously creating new meanings, opening space for belonging across multiple cultural contexts.
Afro-Eclecticism is a dynamic, multifaceted cultural concept that celebrates the intersection of African heritage and diverse global influences. The platform serves as an exploration of this concept through cuisine, music, interior design, visual arts, and fashion.
STATE.DPT is a grassroots cultural enrichment agency and creative studio operating in the subculture since 2020. Based in Den Haag, the agency bridges the gap between white-cube sociocultural theory and underground community enrichment, following a cultural ethos that advocates for collective responsibility and congregation at a time when third spaces have faced eradication.
As a catalyst for diverse, left-field cultural experiences, STATE.DPT has conducted high-grade exhibitions, panel talks, concerts, club nights, and multidisciplinary creative productions across the Netherlands.