Amsterdam, Spring 2024

Dear reader,

Recently we rounded up the Finale programme of Edition IX – Bodies and Technologies, taking place between September 2023 and February 2024 across many different Amsterdam venues. With immense pride we look back at the important works that have been created during the two-year time span of this edition, and we want to extend a big thank you to the artists and researchers for their commitment. We also want to thank the ever-branching network of creative practitioners that have supported these productions, as well as our co-production and presentation partners and funders.

Importantly, we want to take this letter as a moment to express our deep appreciation for you dear audiences, for with your presence, participation, reflections, questions and love, you have fulfilled a key role in bringing these works to life.

This awareness of the constituent role audiences play in performance work led us to initiate, in 2012, the ‘visitor report’. We see the visitor report as an index of participation and a method of documentation of our events. The affectual, relational, and embodied nature of performance work is not always easily captured in audio-visual formats. To supplement such formats, we commission written reports which are meant to offer subjective responses to a lived experience of a work, or an event, and its context. The visitor report is, therefore, not to be confused with a critical review. It is first and foremost a form of witnessing. The people commissioned to write the report span a range of positions and practices both within and outside the field of art.

So here we are: with excitement we share with you the thoughtful and sensitive accounts of this past Edition, including curator and writer Staci Bu Shea, who we invited to write about Constantina Zavitsanos’ performance(s) Entrophy; curator Eva Posas, who attended the launch programme of Nuraini Juliastuti’s publication Stories of Wounds and Wonder; artist, researcher, and pedagogue Elioa Steffen who reflected on the reading performance that was part of the archive activation of Grant Watsons How We Behave / An Archive of Radical Practice; designer Elisabeth Rafstedt accounting of the launch events around Susanne Altmann’s publication When Technology Was Female: Histories of Construction and Deconstruction, 1917–1989; and curator and researcher Musoke Nalwoga, covering the world premiere of Black Speaks Back’s short film ZWARTE IBIS. The writer we invited for Samia Henni’s book launch unfortunately could not attend. We propose instead an in-depth interview about her Performing Colonial Toxicity project with Mrinmayee Bhoot that was published by Stir World magazine.

We hope you will enjoy reading the reports, whether you have or haven’t attended the events, trusting the generative potential of these rich pieces of writing, forms of witnessing and imagination. And finally, we cannot ignore the unfolding context in which these accounts will reach you. We ask what it means to bear witness in the present, to leave witness accounts for future eyes, as we witness with awe the unstoppable force of the student lead protests, here and abroad, against Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. We are disillusioned with the violent response by the police, our politicians and the media, in an attempt to shift attention away from what are legitimate forms of gatherings and demands aiming for equal justice for Palestinians. Within this context, it is not only a question of witnessing, but of acknowledging what we can learn from the courage of these students and staff who dare to speak truth to the present.

Frédérique Bergholtz,
with the If I Can’t Dance team