SPACES & RESIDENCIES

The Rotterdam Pilot Hub

Rotterdam is home to the first Agora Now hub world-wide. The city itself is a living laboratory: diverse, entrepreneurial, and outward-looking. Its priorities—inclusivity, innovation, interconnectivity—are deeply aligned with Agora Now’s DNA. As a port city, Rotterdam naturally connects to the wider world.

We started with a pilot in 2023, in partnership with Boijmans van Beuningen, we developed a pilot hub in Rotterdam Zuid and hosted our first “slow” residencies for artists Maria Magdalena Kozlowska and Kenny Gomes, combined with public programmes, while building lasting collaborations with cultural and social actors in the city. Rotterdam is home to many of our Dutch artists.

In Summer 2025, 5 local artists undertook a micro-residency together focused on the neighbourhoods of Bloemhof and Hillevliet in Rotterdam Zuid. This time-limited collective explored tools, models, tiny experiments, and the smallest gestures and things that can help bring people together, work from collective power, and reflected on what it means to be an artist. Through 8 weeks of gathering and small-scale creative actions, they experimented with how the potential of moments of togetherness can create a broader social tissue to hold us all, with this central question: how do we become a “we” again?

After almost five years of experimentation and growth our next steps are to secure a solid home base in De Hillevliet, Rotterdam Zuid. This longer-term space, with activities starting in January 2026, will allow us to expand our programme of residencies, knowledge exchange, neighbourhood and community engagement.

Rotterdam: Activities 2023–24

Our Rotterdam pilot began in November 2023 with Dutch/Cape Verdean spoken word and jazz artist Kenny Gomes, and Dutch-based Polish music theatre and opera artist Maria Magdalena Kozłowska taking time to work on their practice, coming together with local communities, and performing over three months.

An artist faculty made up of Kenny and Maria plus spoken word artist Y.M.P; guitarist and composer Aart Strootman; artist, researcher and interventionist Merel Smith, and choreographer, researcher and performer Floor van Leeuwen will curate a public programme sharing their artistic ideas and practices in informal settings in the city between May and September 2024.

You can read more about the Rotterdam pilot here, and watch Kenny and Maria in conversation with agora now founder Naomi Russell here.

Buenos Aires

Agora now’s first south-south residency saw the electrifying Mozambican dancer and choreographer Idio Chicheva in Buenos Aires hosted by our partner in BA Planta Inclan led by Juan Onofri Barbato and Elisa Carricajo. Idio simultaneously developed his research in residence at Planta Inclan and with communities in the southern area of the city.

Local artists had the opportunity to enjoy free training and research experience looking at the topic: what dance for what space? The project created a deep connection between bodily expression and diverse urban spaces through practical improvisation, instant composition, and interpretation – using traditional Mozambican dance as its inspiration.

A new edition in Autumn 2025 marks the programme’s first national open call for artists based in Argentina who work outside the capital. 62 applications were received representing every province in the Argentinian federation, and Masi Mamani, an indigenous artist from the Kolla Nation in Jujuy will be the next resident. With a focus on body practices, this residency seeks to raise questions about the nation and its borders, encouraging reflections on our identity from the territories of the Global South.

Read the personal reflections of agora founder Naomi Russell on the importance of this south-south residency here.

Julidans: The Polish Project, with Maria Kozlowska

During her Rotterdam residency in 2024, artist Maria Magdalena Kozłowska undertook research with the Polish community in the city. This culminated in a new production that premiered in the international festival Julidans 2025 edition in Amsterdam.

In The Polish Project she weaves a musical and visual universe where physical labour and artistic expression merge. It’s a world where scaffolding becomes a stage, a pallet truck turns into an instrument, and a worker’s story transforms into a libretto — all accompanied by live jazz. Born from conversations with Polish migrant workers, the result is a raw, lyrical performance full of rhythm, breath, and unfiltered honesty. Their voices — recorded, sung, whispered — resonate between scaffolding tubes, bodies, and speakers. The boundaries between labour and art, between documentation and imagination, dissolve.

Using opera, choreography, and video, Maria Magdalena explores the fragile balance between identity, embodiment, and economic reality. The performance is an ode to invisible labour, to lost ideals, and to the resilience of people who keep building — not only houses, but themselves. In this universe, the ethos of art and the ethos of labour are inseparable: both demand commitment, push the body to its limits, and carry the risk of exhaustion — or even collapse. Working without protection can kill — just like continuing to dance while falling. Art and labour here are not only identities, but markers of class, always inches away from the edge.

Photo: Rosa Quist

Liquid Becomings

Liquid Becomings — the European Pavilion 2024 — is a travelling pavilion and radically networked stage. In 2024 it took the form of four creative journeys by small boats along four of Europe’s greatest rivers: the Danube, the Rhine, the Tagus, and the Vistula. The four journeys crossed 11 countries, travelling a combined distance of 1.394 kilometres.

After sailing on the four European rivers, the artistic crews came together in Lisbon for a three-day festival on 7-9th November 2024, in a rich series of performances, art exhibitions, debates, concerts, literature, get-togethers, and parties.

This multidisciplinary programme placed artistic creation and reflection at the heart of the debate on Europe’s future, promoting meaningful dialogues between artists and local communities.

The European Pavilion 2024 is commissioned by the European Cultural Foundation.

Read more about it here.