Crafting Futures
Hosted by Squish
Organized by Squish, ‘Crafting Futures’ is a multidisciplinary program with an exhibition and events to engage the audience. It shares queer perspectives on intimate affinities, focusing on reappropriating and transmitting cultural heritage.
These events include performances, workshops, film screenings, and an art market. Through a collective exhibition, Squish aims to offer alternatives to Western and binary perspectives, reflecting on past and future traditions. By appreciating norms and traditions as fluid and nuanced rather than rigid, Squish seeks to enhance our connection to their origins and future, both individually and communally. The goal is to create a space for community growth, pleasure, debate, and care.
The exhibition explores what legacy means to artists shaping a desirable future in a multicultural society that lives in harmony with its environment. The four featured artists use multimedia to engage in an intimate dialogue on the tensions between traditions, frustrations, and hopes.
- Hussel Zhu is a visual artist, researcher, and short story writer who explores his role as an Asian immigrant in Europe, highlighting cultural dislocation and translation failures in his work.
- Esmee Willemsen is a Dutch product designer graduate based in Berlin whose work spans functional to experimental creations, driven by societal issues and the climate crisis.
- Charmaine de Heij uses portraiture, still lifes, and archival collages to decolonise historical narratives, drawing from her perspective of person of colour with Surinamese and Dutch heritage.
- Rik Versteeg embraces a multitude of mediums to convey the nuances of queer experiences, addressing themes of self-acceptance, identity, love, and the struggle for equality.
The film program Beyond Echoes features seven short films, ranging from classic documentaries to experimental essays, offering intimate, culturally diverse perspectives on reclaiming cultural heritage with a queer and tender approach. All films have English subtitles, with spoken languages including Turkish, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, and French.
- Awicha by Belen Resnikowski (Bolivia)
- Cruising by Nadir Sönmez (Turkey)
- Raizes by Céline Ruffin-Bayardin (France)
- Pele de Monstro by Barbara Maria (Brazil)
- This is not. A Muse by Thaís DeMelo (Brazil)
- Bubbles by Xinyu XuXX & Xiaoyu 1002 (China)
- 261 by Juliette Henry (France)
The filmscreening costs €5,00 and takes place on Friday the 6th, between 20.00 and 22.00.
General entry ticket price: €3,00, ticket to the movie screening: €5,00
- opening times:
Thursday: 18.00–21.00
Friday: 17.00–22.00
Saturday: 14.00–18.00
Sunday: 14.00–19.00
The movie screening tickets are sold on the Friday ticket button, as registration ticket.
Squish, a queer-feminist cultural platform, primarily supports LGBTQ+ culture makers. The organization adopts an intersectional approach to questioning identity politics through the development of various multidisciplinary events. Not limiting its impact to fine arts, Squish aims to create and blend communities, arts, and politics in diverse formats. Its regular events include performative club nights, film screenings, and contemporary art exhibitions.
Recurring Squish collaborators include Creative Womxn Rotterdam, Queer Rotterdam, WORM, and Roodkapje.