Rotterdam is home to agora’s pilot hub which began in November 2023. A key part of the pilot are our very first ‘slow’ residencies with artists Kenny Gomes and Maria Magdalena Kozlowska, which both begin this month – March 2024 – running to the end of May.
Using the theme: How can we use our voice? – Can we raise it in the name of something? over the course of the three months, Kenny and Maria will have the time and space to explore and imagine their ideas, test and experiment artistic practices, and create dialogues which will strengthen both them as artists and the communities with whom they’ll be working.
Kenny is a Rotterdam based Dutch/Cape Verdean spoken word artist and jazz musician, and Maria is a similarly Rotterdam-based Polish/Dutch opera and music theatre maker. They represent agora’s aim of creating a new model of working that brings artists of different practices and different experiences to work in relation to each other.
And Rotterdam is a very special place to begin the agora residencies: its mercantile, open spirit, typical of port cities, is of vital symbolic importance, and intrinsically connects the city to different places and cultures across the world, an ideal which drives agora’s work in setting up a network of global residencies.
Everyone who is part of the agora movement wants to find new ways and create better, fairer and alternative conditions for artists and communities to experiment, make, and share their work and ideas. In Rotterdam we’ll try out some of the different concepts we’ve imagined together as a community over many online and live gatherings over the past two years. We know we’ll learn a lot as we put our ideas into action, and we look forward to sharing what we discover in the year ahead!
The Rotterdam pilot will also include a public programme curated and led by a local faculty of five artists with a focus on the neighbourhoods of Bloemhof, Feijenoord and Carnisse in Rotterdam Zuid. The Rotterdam faculty is Merel Smitt, Floor van Leeuwen, Aart Strootman, Y.M.P.Flow and Maria Kozlowska; an exchange between agora artists and Advertising + Beyond students from Willem de Kooning who have been researching how to build ‘spaces of meeting’. We’ll have more on this in a future blog.
We are hugely grateful to all our funders for believing in our concept and allowing us to take this important first step of practical execution. The Rotterdam pilot has received generous support from Vrienden Loterij Fonds, Van Beuningen Peterich Fonds and the collective contribution of our Founding and Radical Friends and other individual donors. Financial support for the research phase of espaço agora now globally was additionally received from The Linbury Trust, Richard Thomas Foundation and an Anonymous Foundation.
Images © Kenny Gomes; Eva Roefs
