Underdeveloped #4
Opening Underdeveloped #4
On Friday 12 September at 7 PM, we will open the final exhibition in the Underdeveloped exhibition series – Underdeveloped #4 – and celebrate the start of a new cultural season. You can also join a performance by ‘Shadows United’.
“We – Display Distribute & Krista Jantowski, Hassan Ahmad Omar & Hasniya Ahmad Omar, mul-thee-fuhngk-shuh-nl (Floor van Meeuwen & Jorien Ketelaar), MIP Research Center (Yen-ting Kuan & Alice Strete), De Uitpluizers, Spin Collective, Kasih Graphic, Kiosk Rotterdam, Mg Pringgotono (Stuffo), ook_anders, Domestic Notes (Nuraini Juliastuti), Shadows United, Artlab, Autonomy Lab – WdKA, Pris Roos, Tomi Hilsee, Isfahan Film Club, WORKNOT, Maoyi, Carmen Jose, Lumbung film, Stichting Mano, Stichting Formaat, Take-a-Way, Reza Afisina, reinaart vanhoe, Garage Rotterdam staff and more participants to be announced – invite you to join us for the next iteration of Underdeveloped.”
The Underdeveloped exhibition series proposes other ways of organising within the cultural world, with a focus on interconnected practices where art contributes to in its own capacity and imagination.
In the third Underdeveloped edition at Garage Rotterdam, the exhibition space is considered a particle of an existing and growing cultural network in Rotterdam – a network containing individuals, places, groups, momentum and energy. During the exhibition period, everyone can make use of a printing workshop, the familiar Underdeveloped kitchen, a shop, library, video room, materials and an educational corner.
Underdeveloped #4 is not about ‘end products’ or the delivery of an individual contribution. That is why all artists are mentioned as a collective. “Networking is not a diagram but a lived rhythm.”
Stay tuned!
Brandstof x Public program
The recurring programme Brandstof is a tool for Garage Rotterdam to activate exhibitions with extra events. Underdeveloped #4 organisers Reza Afisina and reinaart vanhoe understand exhibitions as living rooms that are constantly breathing. The public program for Underdeveloped #4 is in constant flux.
Check out our activity webpage to view the (in)formal public program and/or send an email to info@garagerotterdam.nl if you want to make use of the space yourself during the exhibition period of Underdeveloped #4.
Workshop: publishing in public
Workshop: publishing in public
By mul-thee-fuhngk-shuh-nl
Join this poster printing workshop about ownership and reclaiming public space. In the workshop you will use (analog) printing techniques to make large images with A4’s. By blowing up, scanning & frottage you will enlarge images, make a d.i.y. glue recipe and collectively stick it in and around Garage Rotterdam. With soup!
What to bring? Aabook or text that is important to you and optional your laptop.
Free entry!
A second edition of this workshop will take place on 26 October at 2 PM.
Gathering: Isfahan Film Club x WORKNOT!
Join us on Saturday 11 October for a gathering with Isfahan Film Club and WORKNOT!
Central in this event lies the theme of housing and domestic life, and their intersections with precarity and displacement.
“In our extractive and capitalist reality, individual and collective bodies are violated under financial, environmental and (geo)political regimes of oppression and eviction.”
The gathering starts with an introduction by WORKNOT!, followed by a screening of various film excerpts that lead into an open discussion during a community dinner prepared by the collective. The screening serves as an exercise in constructing a narrative from audiovisual documentation of the subjecs, explored across different contexts, urgencies and forms of precarity. In collaboration with Isfahan Film Club, WORKNOT! curated this screening to encourage collective reflection and exchange.
Programme
- 14.00 – Walk-in
- 14.30 – Introduction
- 15.00 – Screening
- 17.00 – (Vegan) dinner & discussion
To know how many people we can expect for the event and dinner, we kindly ask you to sign-up for the gathering via this form.
Free entry for this event with an exhibition ticket (€2,00)
Read more about Isfahan Film Club and WORKNOT!
Disaster Cooking
Disaster Cooking
Sunday 19 October, 12:30 PM — Garage Rotterdam
About the event
In March 2025, the European Commission and the High Representative introduced a new strategy to strengthen Europe’s ability to prevent and respond to emerging crises. Among its recommendations: every household should be ready to sustain itself for at least 72 hours — with essentials like food, water, documents, batteries, and more.
Canned goods and protein bars might keep us alive — but do they also nourish our sense of calm or offer the comfort we need in stressful times?
In September, the regional disaster information center Rijnmond Veilig released a cookbook for emergency situations, featuring seven recipes, interviews, and a foreword by the Mayor of Rotterdam. As part of the ongoing project Meals for Inner Peace Research Center – currently on show in Underdeveloped #4 – you can try out some of these recipes at Garage Rotterdam on Sunday 19 October.
Join us on Sunday 19 October at 12:30 PM for this experimental cooking session exploring how food can bring us a sense of peace, even in moments of uncertainty.
Free entry with a ticket for the exhibition Underdeveloped #4.
Learn more about Rijnmond Veilig’s cookbook and how to prepare for the unexpected — one meal at a time.
Gathering: Isfahan Film Club x WORKNOT!
Footage Therapy
Saturday 25 October, from 2 PM onwards
Following their first event on housing and domestic life in relation to precarity and displacement, Isfahan Film Club and WORKNOT! invite you to a second gathering: Footage Therapy.
Many of us know the intensity of moving or migrating to a new city—with its unfamiliar rhythms, networks, and systems of control. Adapting to a new place often means negotiating one’s sense of identity and belonging. Yet, there are moments that interrupt this process—when our bodies slow down, when we reconnect, when we feel at home again.
Isfahan Film Club and WORKNOT! invite you to bring memories, images, or fragments that relate to this theme and to the city of Rotterdam. These could be clips from your phone, found footage, or stories spoken aloud. They don’t need to be polished – what matters is the act of sharing and listening. Together, we’ll create an intimate emotional archive of belonging in the city.
With participants’ consent, the session will be recorded and may later be developed into a collective film. The evening concludes with a shared dinner and discussion.
Programme
14:00 — Walk-in
14:15 — Introduction & check-in
14:45 — Footage Therapy (with coffee & tea)
17:00 — Dinner
18:00 — Discussion & wrap-up
To know how many people we can expect during the event and dinner, we kindly ask you to sign up via the registration form.
Free entry for this event with an exhibition ticket (€2.00).
Read more about Isfahan Film Club and WORKNOT!
Workshop: publishing in public
Workshop: publishing in public
By mul-thee-fuhngk-shuh-nl
Join this poster printing workshop about ownership and reclaiming public space. In the workshop you will use (analog) printing techniques to make large images with A4’s. By blowing up, scanning & frottage you will enlarge images, make a d.i.y. glue recipe and collectively stick it in and around Garage Rotterdam. With soup!
What to bring? Aabook or text that is important to you and optional your laptop.
Free entry!
Workshop: Passport Making
Join the collective Snails Houses for a workshop for adoptees and fosters, taking place at Garage Rotterdam! There are a limited amounts of tickets available, you can purchase your tickets via this link.
Do you wonder what home means to you? Are you stuck between two or more cultures? Are you in the process of (re)connecting to your (cultural) roots?
Snails Houses invites you to connect with others by exploring ways we can reconnect with our cultural identity, with our roots, and navigate what “home” and “belonging” means to us, as a community.
During this event, you will make paper from carrots and create your passports made from carrot paper. If you are an adoptee or foster, you purchase a ticket for this workshop.
On Sunday 9 November, the Underdeveloped #4 exhibition will be open as usual, so you are welcome to come through and get a glimpse of this event.
Natafelen: Meal for Collective Inner Peace
Join us on Friday 14 November for a special edition of Natafelen: Meal for Collective Inner Peace
Is there such thing as collective inner peace? Can we develop collective inner peace through a shared dinner? To close off the exhibition Underdeveloped #4, Meals for Inner Peace Research Center hosts a collective dinner on Friday 14 November, which includes two parts: cooking and eating.
15.30 – 18.30 | Cooking
19.00 – 21.00 | Dinner (vegetarian)
Fee: pay as you wish or can (up from €20,00)
We kindly ask you to sign-up for either the cooking workshop, dinner or both via this form.
About Meal for Collective Inner Peace
“We have experienced three editions of the Underdeveloped exhibition series, which takes a collaborative approach to art and focuses on working together. The concept echoes to the Indonesian word ‘lumbung’, which literally means a communal rice barn. This concept can also be applied to interdisciplinary and collective artistic practices, which can offer mutual aid and support within the network, even in the most extreme cases.”
“Whenever we encounter emergency or prepper kits, they are meant to be individual, or at most to extend to one’s close family. But in times of trouble, we can’t get through it alone. Lumbung thus becomes a helpful idea in critical time. Let’s reimagine the notion of food for emergencies, cook and eat together from shelf-stable ingredients with participating artists from Underdeveloped #4.”
Lecture and Cooking Performanc: Moenipah OS
Domestic Notes (Nuraini Juliastuti) and Reading Sideways Press invite you to attend their event Moenipah OS, on Saturday 15 November, 14:00 – 17:00 at Garage Rotterdam.
This lecture is about writing and reading systems – less for conveying and exchanging messages, and more for living knowledge production. The lecture will take place in Grandma’s Cubby – a room in the exhibition Underdeveloped #4 – which is recreated in the memory of Nuraini Juliastuti’s grandmother, Moenipah. Based on the conventional education standard, Moenipah (1924 – 2001) would be considered illiterate since she could not read and write. Throughout her life, Moenipah narrated a rich life guided by an alternative roadmap for reading and writing. Using various found archives and artefacts, this event attempts to shed light on an alternative alphabetical system for living, behaving and surviving.
The installation Grandma’s Cubby attempts to materialise a vision to survive within the environment which can feel suffocating and limited. Such an environment might be an over-crowded space with various things hovering between important and unimportant, traces of unspoken fear and trauma attached to things and spoken words.
“I created a replica of the small corner which I used to inhabit for a long time, but I cannot really put my fingers on how to define it. Making various kinds of collections of things is my personalised way to create a sense of agency and a breathing space amidst the clutter and hoard, literally and figuratively. Organising a series of collections forms a simple exercise to perform orderliness in the middle of chaos, living and dying. I refer to the room as the Grandma’s Cubby because this was the look of the space where my Grandma spent most of her days. But this can also be the room of other Grandmas, elder figures, manifesting the impulses to observe, tidy up in a persistent manner, listen quietly, and tell stories without being bothered by the division between fact and fiction. Developing a cubby amidst the rubbles represents the resilience to go on and the capacities to make use of everything including the discarded feelings.”
Read more about Grandma’s Cubby here.
Loteria Fundraiser for the Mesoamerican Caravan
Join SPIN Collective, Feministas Rotterdam and Het Rode Keukentje for a Loteria Fundraiser for the Mesoamerican Caravan!
This event will take place on the last day of the exhibition Underdeveloped #4.
Join us for an evening filled with:
A mexican bingo loteria with exciting prizes, screen printing patch-making, radio broadcast reading, stories and music, delicious dinner prepared with Het Rode Keukentje and DJ’s for dancing!
During this event we are raising money for the Mesoamerican Caravan that is traveling from Mexico to Brazil for COP30, organized by Indigenous and campesino social movements. It is a space of encountering and mobilization for the people and communities that fight in defense of Mother Earth. They need funds, support and lots of people following their travels to ensure their safety as much as possible.
You can find more info via this link.
This Underdeveloped #4 closing event will take place on Sunday 16 November from 5 – 9.30 PM