UPCOMING COURSES

After an exciting edition in 2025, the Independent School for the City and Loom - practice for cultural transformation, will again organise a compact workshop looking at the public space of the city as a place for protest. Together with René Boer, Mark Minkjan and Katía Truijen, we will regard activism as a discipline that involves revealing facts, building narratives and creating real-world impact. Drawing inspiration from past and present generations of activists, we will explore how to design the communication of non-conventional narratives and the conditions for disobedient assemblies. This could include blockades, barricades, banners, choreographies, legal tactics, social media memes, squatting operations, consumer strikes or other, more subtle forms of expressing dissent with regard to the status quo—using whatever tools are necessary to drive change.

The Netherlands is the world’s second-largest exporter of meat and dairy, just after the United States. To achieve this staggering result, animals have been ruthlessly reduced to their most basic function: protein production. The landscape itself has been reshaped to serve what we define as economic necessity. The costs of maintaining this position are enormous. The Netherlands has become a biodiversity desert, dominated by monocultural, high-energy crops for animal feed and dotted with mega-farms housing hundreds of millions of chickens, pigs, cows, and goats. These systems pollute air and water and turn livestock populations into immunological time bombs with global consequences. But a different future is possible!

That's why in this workshop we will analyse our own consumption, discover the current landscape of animal proteins, see the alternative as represented by organic farms and meat and dairy substitutes, and speculate on what a post animal protein future would look like. Tickets are available for 250 euro here.

For over twelve years, Stad in de Maak / City in the Making has set up temporary sites in and around Rotterdam that act as focal points for communities – places where people can gather, live, work, support each other, and feel rooted. Now, City in the Making is seeking to set up their first permanent site. No longer on borrowed time, or in borrowed property, but secured for times to come! In this studio we aim to help City in the Making explore how an abandoned warehouse can be transformed into a “lifehouse” – an institution or place at the heart of a neighbourhood that empowers communities. Together we'll be looking for ways to get this started, designed and financed and, moreover, to keep it going, even when the lights around us go out. This studio is a collaboration with Stad in de Maak; therefore, a reduced participation fee of 50 euro applies. Limited spots available here