Seminar Blogs

“How to Be Many: Democratic Practice and Institutional Plurality” — Jilke van der Kolk
How can we be many? A seemingly simple question, yet it became the red thread of the latest Transmission in Motion seminar “Culture for Democracy, Democracy for Culture”. Lars Ebert returned to it insistently, using it as an opening within the increasingly narrow space the cultural sector seems to occupy. How can the cultural sector…
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“Valuing Culture Over Time” — Tom Watkins
During the seminar led by Lars Ebert, Secretary General of Culture Action Europe, I found myself reflecting on the temporality of value. The conversation moved through policy, inclusion, advocacy, and institutional structures, but the underlying tension of how quickly something is expected to prove its worth to justify public investment resonated with me. Culture seems…
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“Institution as a Solution?” — Agata Kok
In Living a Feminist Life, feminist scholar Sara Ahmed (2017) states: “When you expose a problem you pose a problem. It might then be assumed that the problem would go away if you would just stop talking about or if you went away,” noting that the act of naming injustice is often treated as the…
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“Rehearsing Institution” — Margot Van den Eeckhout
What stayed with me most from the session with Anne Breure was her way of thinking institutions as something that can be rehearsed. Breure described her graduation project as a proposal for a new institution. A reflection on what the world might look like in fifteen years and how a theatre could be organized differently…
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“When Institutional Critique Works — and Still Feels Unfinished” — Tom Watkins
One of the questions that stayed with me after the Transmission in Motion seminar On Institutionalizing Differently was not whether institutions can be changed from within, but what it means when such attempts seem to work. In the conversation between Anne Breure, Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink, and Maaike Bleeker, institutions appeared less as fixed structures and…
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“BECOMING-HOUSE” — Nikita Chistov
Anne Breure is interested in the new. On the page of Theater Utrecht, where Breure has served as an artistic director since 2022, one finds her statement that “The power of theatre is that we constantly imagine a new world. Now we have a home where we continuously create worlds and ideas side by side….
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“The Web We Roam: Crafting Institutional Life” — Jilke van der Kolk
Institutions are often understood as fixed and abstract entities. They appear as stable structures shaped by policy and established procedures, leaving little room for imagination or creative intervention. From this perspective, institutions seem distant from artistic practice and resistant to change. During the Transmission in Motion seminar “On Institutionalizing Differently,” Anne Breure unsettled this view…
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“Outer Space as a Blind Spot” – Margot Van den Eeckhout
During the Transmission in Motion session on “Theater, Moon Studies, and Interplanetary Entanglements,” one sentence, spoken by Dr. Felipe Cervera, immediately activated me: “Why is theatre only about land politics?” The question lingered long after the session ended. It was striking not because it dismissed existing theatrical engagements with geopolitics, but because it exposed a…
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“This Is Not Fiction” – Agata Kok
Treating space as an object of inquiry within the Humanities may initially appear abstract (not to say absurd) – particularly when the focus shifts from science-fiction representations toward outer space itself: that is, toward our concrete interactions with and entanglements in the universe beyond Earth. However, as has been widely demonstrated, performances and performative actions…
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“Inside the Model: Thinking Knowledge through the Orrery” – Jilke van der Kolk
How can a tiny model of the solar system reveal the responsibility involved in knowing? This question stayed with me after the Transmission in Motion seminar on Theatre, Moon Studies, and Interplanetary Entanglements. Planetary knowledge is often imagined as distant, even though it is always grounded in specific materials and forms of mediation. Charles LeDray’s…
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