Gathering #2 - Queer ecologies quilting workshop
Date/time: Friday 2nd October, 4-6pm
Guest speaker: Toni Kritzer in collaboration with WOEKER festival Antwerp
ASCA/UvA respondent: Slava Greenberg tbc.
Location: Academy of Theater and Dance, Garden Above the School, Jodenbreestraat 3 (8th floor/rooftop)

Artist and gardener Toni Kritzer will guide us through this queer ecologies quilt making session, with storytelling, herbal tea, and queer plant lore. Stitching fabrics and stories together, we will be co-designing one part of a wider quilt; working primarily with fabric painting and embroidery. The wider quilt is commissioned by WOEKER festival Entwerp, inviting four artists involved in a large participatory quilt making through the fall 2026. The quilt will take the form of a four-panel work and will be developed collectively through a series of community making sessions. The overarching visual theme is inspired by wild plants, spontaneous growth, and the ways in which life flourishes beyond imposed boundaries. The fourth of the quilt crafted under Toni Kritzer’s guidance is a tiny garden, overgrown by queer plants: icons such as lavender and pansies, herbal allies for HRT, and other plants we feel akin to in our unruly queerness.

With the larger project taking cues from the AIDS Memorial Quilt, Toni’s approach to this project weaves together narratives of illness, queerness, and care. From a trans* and crip perspective, they are curious about resistant engagements with the medical-industrial complex, such as DIY HRT (hormone replacement therapy), and the shared enmeshment in ideological narratives of “natural” and “unnatural”. The garden quilt recognizes plants as deeply entangled with these ongoing histories and as powerful comrades, whether in Prospect Cottage or other queer gardens.

Garden work:

• Mulching the beds with straw. Mulching is a crucial part of tending to the garden, keeping the soil covered to sustain the microbial life within and aid with water retention. In this gathering, the mulch is covering up the beds for fall and winter, like humans would cuddle underneath a blanket/quilt.

Suggested reading:

• Eli Claire Unfurl/Brilliant imperfection
• Jan Zita Grover AIDS and other clear cuts
• Derek Jarman Modern Nature

Biography

Toni Kritzer is a trans*, white, chronically ill/disabled performance artist and gardener, based in Amsterdam. There and elsewhere, they forage for stories beyond the human, and share these stories through artistic research, critical walking practices, and performance. With a background in theater, their work is interdisciplinary and includes performance, writing, facilitating, and communal gardening. In 2024, they graduated from the Academy of Theater and Dance Amsterdam with a degree in Theater Directing, and are an associate researcher at DAS. At the ATD, they initiated a community garden in 2023, where they host a series of events that anchor gardening within art education, and explore/embody ecological (community) care. Most recently, they are tending to narratives of disability and illness within ecosystems, following slugs, viruses, and weeds. Since 2025, they are a part of the temporary master “Monstrous Futurities” at Sandberg Instituut.

WOEKER is a multidisciplinary artistic & activist program where trans, intersex, agender, non­binary and genderfluid artists take center stage. From 13 to 29 November, it will unfold across Antwerp, Ghent, Leuven, Hasselt, Bruges and Brussels. It is initiated by Antwerp Queer Arts Festival and Genderspectrum, who organized Belgium’s first Trans Remembrance Expo last year. WOEKER takes its name from the Dutch word for unruly growth — life that insists on itself where it shouldn’t be able to, like weeds pushing through cracks in asphalt. We recognize this same vitality in trans and gender diverse communities: being told we are “out of place” yet cultivating new ways of living, caring, imagining, and resisting.

Gathering #3 - Stories to sleep to
Date/time: 13.11 (provisional) 5pm-7pm
Guest speaker: Mayomi Basnayaka with a guest artist
ASCA/UvA respondent: tbd.
Location: Academy of Theater and Dance, Garden Above the School, Jodenbreestraat 3 (8th floor/rooftop)

The wonderful artist Mayomi Basnayaka will return to the garden above the school with her project Stories to sleep to, to guide us and the garden into winter hibernation. We wonder: what kind of lullaby would a garden need to transition into wintertime?

Stories to Sleep to is an ongoing performance series where artists of color, whose practices resonate with the decolonial theory of slowness, use narrative and sonic works to invite rest. Through the age-old form of the bedtime story, they share folklore, personal mythologies, and dreamlike fictions rooted in their cultural and artistic practices. Born from a longing for more restful, comfortable ways to share narratives, the series reimagines storytelling as a collective descent into dreaming.

Questions of slowness and adjacent temporalities come up time and time again in the garden above the school. The temporality of the garden and its more than human community plays out at a much slower pace than the rush of school life: the slow unfurling of leaves, the expansion of a rhizomatic network, the ripening of fruit in fall. It offers not just a break to the students and others, but a different rhythm altogether: the persistent slow motion growth of plants functions as a reminder that there need be no rush, that the busyness of the institution is not the only rhythm available. As the rooftop is a place people come to for short breaks, the plants gently invite them to linger a little in a different temporality. As Mac Griswold puts it: “Gardening has been called the slowest of the performing arts” (National Gallery of Art Archives Washington 1988) and as such, it grows time, like it grows strawberries and sage.

In a world where rest is often solitary, privatized, or inaccessible, in this event we position the garden as a space for communal rest, where softness, quiet, and dreaming become shared practices. Welcoming overworked and under-rested bodies, participants are invited to snore, dream, or simply lie down and rest through the performance. Here, performance is not something to stay alert for, but something to soften into, napping through the dominant expectations of presence, attention, and productivity.

The performance is both an offering and an invitation: to slow down, listen differently, and dream in the company of others. After the session, a meal with ingredients from the garden above the school invites into conviviality and soft chatter, slipping into hibernation season together.

Garden work:

• Tucking bulbs and seeds into the soil. Some plants (like daffodils, crocuses and snowdrops) need to be planted in fall to have a good winter’s sleep, so they can sprout early in spring. We collectively tuck them in for hibernation, with the horizon of spring in mind as we slip into the dark season.

Suggested reading:

• Tricia Hersey Rest is Resistance
• Bell Hooks Belonging: A Culture of Space
• Laura Doyle, Simon Gikandi, and Mwangi wa Gĩthĩnji Decolonial Reconstellations (Vol. 1: Dynamics of Deep Time and Deep Place)
• Dr. Jo-Ann Archibald (Q'um Q'um Xiiem) Indigenous Storywork
• Curatorium The Rest is Up to Us

Biography

Mayomi Basnayaka is a Sri Lankan artist based in Amsterdam, navigating her artistic research practice through embodied knowledge, decolonial theory, and story-telling. She often includes her audience as a key-role in the work as it unfolds through interactive installation, durational performance, and material workshops. Weaving narratives that reflect the multicultural complexities of belonging and displacement, she expands space for migrant communities, as her practice seeks to engage with communities beyond traditional art spaces, bridging artistic practice and everyday life.

Gathering #4 - Winter retreat: wat sluimert er in mijn rust?
Date/time: 14.01 4pm-6pm
Guest speaker: Emilie Gallier and Nina Boas
ASCA/UvA respondent: Leni Van Goidsenhoven tbd.
Location: Academy of Theater and Dance, Garden Above the School, Jodenbreestraat 3 (8th floor/rooftop)

In this two-hours workshop, ATD Lectorate researcher Emilie Gallier shares practices and observations from years of holding quiet space environments at a number of temporary events. These reflections will dialogue with practices she develops together with artist Nina Boas and young people with disability (at the social daycare center Cordaan, and Wildekunst) and a longer-term engagement (five years) organizing and hosting winter retreats at the collective regenerative garden Les Minières which she co-founded in France.

What slumbers in my rest? What is dormant?

Benefitting from winter time, encouraging us to draw from our deepest reserves, we will tune in to what moves from under surfaces. With earthworms as Gallier and Boas’ guiding allies, we will fold inward to sense tiny movements. We will ask the gardens what they want, ask our bodies, exchange seeds, enter dreamworlds. We will tend to the things that hold us (including schedules, plannings, and spatial arrangements) in search for ways for the dormant seeds to flourish.

Garden work:

• Observation, asking what might the garden want? Sitting with the garden, standing with the garden, folding with the garden, covering with the garden. Seed-swapping. Exchanging with other gardens.

Suggested reading:

• Tricia Hersey We will rest ! The Art of Escape
• Zine The Garden Above the School
• Leni Van Goidsenhoven Ongehoord Over kleine interacties wanneer woorden niet vanzelfsprekend zijn

Biography
Emilie Gallier (she, her) is held by soils in Leiden (The Netherlands) and Les Minières (France). She is an embodied reader, a dancer, a gardener, a mother, a researcher with curiosity for situations of holding and being held, reading with a tactile gaze, and for being in the world head down-butt up. Through dance, textures (of papers and textiles), poetic documentation, and in collaborative ways, she studies and develops soil connections practices, in close relationship with biodiversity and diversity of experiences, resisting all forms of domination.

2021 was a pivot year for Emilie. She self-published her doctoral thesis in the form of a partly edible book: ‘Reading in Performance, Lire en Spectacle’ (Coventry University). She co-founded the association Les Minières in Normandie, gathering within rurality, regenerative agriculture and artistic practices. She initiated the collaborative project ‘Gleaners and the Worms’ with visual artists Nina Boas (host, education, rituals) and Nienke Terpsma (graphic design, edition, conversation).

Emilie is a Researcher with the ATD Lectorate and a tutor/head-heart of THIRD together with Rajni Shah. Her research relates to soil connections, interspecies performance, earthworms, poetic-ongoing-participatory documentation, social justice.