Why Germany is an international, online lecture series addressing the crackdown on free speech in Germany and beyond. These weekly lectures are co-hosted by a network of institutions that grows over time. By means of a rolling program, it creates a space for creative, informed and considered expression.

In the backdrop of an ever-deteriorating garage nestled in the outskirts of Amsterdam South East, a group of undocumented individuals sought refuge. Their condition laid bare the complexities of the situation, where the pursuit of basic human rights was entangled in bureaucratic mandates. Through videos of interviews and conversations with them, Raul Balai and Ehsan Fardjadniya zoom in on their lives and struggles to collect evidence for a tribunal against the city of Amsterdam in 2025.

The symposium is on occasion of the exhibition Edgelanders: Amsterdam on Trial / Part III: The Witnesses. Through the multi-part project, artists Ehsan Fardjadniya and Raul Balai are building material for a people’s tribunal against the city of Amsterdam in relation to the right to housing for undocumented people.

To accompany the exhibition Edgelanders at de Appel, visual artist and human rights activist Elke Uitentuis will conduct a workshop for parents and children. This creative workshop will introduce topics such as human rights, activism and solidarity through writing, coloring and drawing.

Why Germany is an international, online lecture series addressing the crackdown on free speech in Germany and beyond. These weekly lectures are co-hosted by a network of institutions that grows over time. By means of a rolling program, it creates a space for creative, informed and considered expression.

On the 24th of June, Ann Demeester will moderate an evening about about innovation in the arts and the need for continuity. Since five years de Appel again has a remarkable home: Broedplaats Lely, a brutalistic building in a diffuse part of town, where the accelerated effects of the gentrification of the surrounding are clearly visible. As an institution de Appel is part of this ongoing temporality. Now that the precarity this enhances seems to become more extensive, it is time to start the conversation.

Between sunrise and sunset on 30 November 2020, de Appel devotes space and time to remembering ULAY (born Frank Uwe Laysiepen on 30 November 1943 in Solingen, Germany), an artist and much more, who shaped our institution profoundly and who passed away on March 2nd this year.

To celebrate the publication: Audre Lorde – Dream of Europe: selected seminars and interviews: 1984–1992 (Kenning Editions, 2020), de Appel organised a close reading group starting late September 2020, in order to collectively read and give voice to Lorde’s work as assembled in this book.