As a part of the opening of the Conflux exhibition at Katoenhuis, Noah Rosa will present a Kinetic Sounds performance.
Noah Rosa crafts atmospheric soundscapes that immerse the listener in an uncanny world, both ancient and futuristic. Exploring themes of environmental devastation, collective myth, the sublime, and nebulous spirituality, his music is bleak yet hopeful. Improvisations are filtered through a prismatic lens of digital degradation, appearing on the other side worn and murky as if emerging from a primeval bed of fungus and algae.
Born on an island in the Pacific Northwest and now based between Berlin and Montreal, his practice spans music and sound design for linear and interactive media, experimental music releases, site-specific sound installations, digital lutherie, and location recording.
As a part of the opening of the Conflux exhibition at Katoenhuis, Maggie Khorrami will present a Kinetic Sounds performance.
Maggie Khorrami is a Netherlands-based composer, experimental musician, sound designer, and instrument maker. She studied Sonology at the Royal Conservatoire The Hague and has a background in classical violin and Fine Art. Her work spans electroacoustic performance, sound and light installation, and interactive systems. Her practice is driven by transformation, tension, and the relationship between body and sound, shaping a sonic language that moves between layered electronics, industrial textures, and noise.
Cecile is a lecturer, curator, moderator, and artist. Her work operates at the intersection of debate, philosophy, and art. She is part of the artistic team of the new Rotterdam art space Social Art Platform and teaches in the Leisure & Events Management programme at the Willem de Kooning Academy. She regularly moderates at Debatpodium Arminius and hosts a radio show at Operator Radio.
14:00–16:00 — Talks by Cecile van Bruggen with Stimuleringsfonds talents and CF26 artists
14:00–14:30 — Politics and Poetics with Hung Lu Chan and Justyna Chmielewska
14:30–15:00 — Hacking Systems with Yufei Gao, Jan Zuiderveld and Xinyi Zhang
15:15–16:00 — Sonic Action with Animistic Beliefs and Maggie Khorrami
Chris Tam Nelck, member of the Riso Wizard, is hosting a free Riso workshop. Join them at the Hub for a hands-on protest poster-making workshop with. Using old Conflux posters, flyers, magazines and other scraps, you'll make collages designed for a two-colour Risograph* print.
There will be a short introduction about Riso, including examples and some tips for working with two colours. The printer sadly won’t be at the workshop itself, we’ll focus on analogue image-making, cutting, layering and experimenting with composition. The collages will be printed the following morning, so your freshly printed posters will be ready to collect and presented at the Hub on Saturday.
Free participation. Limited to 7 participants. Sign up via the Google Form below!
sign.nah is a Rotterdam-based writer, DJ, and organizer. At Conflux, they present de:fi, a sociopolitical music archive and ongoing research into the sounds of defiance, resilience, and liberation. In this session, they will debut de-fi.media, a developing online archive mapping sounds and music connected to various liberation movements across the globe.
A highlight of Friday programme at the hub will be a panel talk about rave culture and free parties with 69db and Siuli K.O., who will both play at the Export Club night later in the evening. The talk will be moderated by Eric Parren.
A key innovator in the 1990s Hardtec and Tribe scenes, 69db has been pushing the boundaries of live improvised sets since 1991. As a founding member of Spiral Tribe and R-Zac, he played a pivotal role in shaping the underground rave culture and co-founded Network 23 Recordings, a label that defined the sound of the free party movement in the 1990s. Today, Network 23 continues to inspire a new generation of hard techno producers.
Siuli K.O. is always on the hunt for fresh, forward-thinking sounds in bass and leftfield beats. In the 90s, she was at the foundation of the notorious Acid Planet and Industrial Funk parties, and of experimental labels Grijs and Nocturnal State, deep within The Hague's OG underground scene, connected to Unit Moebius, Curley Esoteric, and Spiral Tribe's Network 23.
Iris (Droom) is known for her dreamlike visuals in graphic design, and her love for 80's sci-fi. She explores a spectrum of analog synth sounds and nostalgia. Her selections mainly consist of italo-disco, electro and beyond.
Chris Tam Nelck (DD) is a multidisciplinary artist working across painting, performance, and text. With a background in fine arts and a keen eye for visual composition. Chris has a long lived love for the performative side of the 80s: experimental gender expressions, new wave and heavy synths.
Together, Droom & DD blend Italo-disco, retro-futurism, warm synths with hints of electro and acid.
Alex Zhang Hungtai is a multidisciplinary artist focused on improvisation and its correlation with the unconscious. After retiring his project Dirty Beaches, Zhang has focused on explorations of improvised music, free jazz, and his role as a composer. His more recent compositions predominantly work with saxophone and drums while also delving into electronic music.
Besides his solo work, his past collaborators include Tashi Dorji, Che Chen, Chris Williams, Sam Shalabi, David Maranha, and Gabriel Ferrandini. Zhang currently works as a composer for film soundtracks, alongside acting in independent films.
He appeared in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return alongside Dean Hurley and Riley Lynch under the fictitious band name Trouble. His latest film score, Godland by Hlynur Pálmason, was featured in the Un Certain Regard competition at the Cannes Film Festival.
For Conflux Festival, Foundscape Orchestra presents a thirty-minute performance at Brutus Rotterdam. Daniel Maalman performs together with Foundscape artists Jaap Mutter and Jasper Schütz, joined by guest musician Farzané, who previously collaborated with Foundscape Orchestra on an earlier site-specific edition of the project. A selection of instruments from the Foundscape Orchestra arsenal is combined with Farzané’s sonic textures. Large and small pneumatic percussion instruments, sound sculptures driven by compressed air, vibration motors and organ pipes form a spatial composition that is partly amplified and partly acoustic, intertwining mechanical rhythms, vibrations and air with Farzané’s sonic world.
Foundscape Orchestra
Foundscape Orchestra is a sound art project created by Daniel Maalman, which over the years has grown into a collaborative project involving artists, musicians and technicians. The project approaches buildings as musical instruments. Each location is explored through its architecture, acoustics, materials and history, after which a spatial composition is developed using self-built mechanical instruments and sound sculptures. Pneumatic percussion, electromagnetic tapping modules, vibration motors, organ pipes and other mechanically controlled sound objects are used to bring spaces and architectural elements into sound. The resulting performances bring together sound art, music, installation and architecture, turning each location into an instrument and compositional space of its own.
Farzané
Farzané (Farzaneh Nouri), an Iranian sound artist, creative coder, and researcher based in the Netherlands, works at the intersection of experimental music and computer science. Her ongoing practice-based research focuses on embodied knowledge in improvisational settings with machines. Embracing AI's fundamental otherness while establishing relational connections, her practice aims at creating conditions of genuine encounter and collaborative destabilization between the artist and the machine. This speculative approach moves beyond technological determinism and cultural essentialism, exploring how human and machine intelligences might co-evolve through creative tension and collaborative aesthetic discovery.
bela (they/them) is a South Korean musician and performance artist based between Berlin and Prague. bela uses guttural vocals and feedback to build texture and resonance. Conceptually, their work often adopts an autobiographical voice that courses through lived experiences, lineage, and transcendance. In this regard, their music and performance ask to renew or expand the sense of locating around sounds and bodies within the social and celestial sphere.
bela presents an audiovisual performance with Anton Filatov, based on his recent album "Korean Love Sonnets". The work is an intense and direct exploration of the acoustics of the guttural voice in relation to other bodies and spaces. bela discovers romance in its most tactile form, leaning into creaks, feedback, and resonance to create a sombre yet intimate hour, suspended by inhuman notes above the material plane.
bela was awarded honorable mention at ZKM’s GigaHertz Prize PopExperimental awards in 2023 for their work on the album Noise and Cries. They participated in the SHAPE+ Platform in 23’-24’, and are a laureate of La Becque residency in 2026. Their solo and collaborative live performances have been featured at Berlin Atonal; Nowadays, NYC; Schauspielhaus Zürich; Cafe OTO, London; CTM Festival, Berlin; and Unsound Kraków.
Behind the decks Genyten brings her broad range of tastes honed by years of working behind the scenes in festivals, clubs and record labels. From downtempo and wave oddballs to sub-heavy stuff and more club-ready sounds, she’s happiest when unexpected combinations come together and the music gets minds as engaged as much as the feet.
Siuli K.O. is always on the hunt for fresh, forward-thinking sounds in bass and leftfield beats. In the 90s, she was at the foundation of the notorious Acid Planet and Industrial Funk parties, and of experimental labels Grijs and Nocturnal State, deep within The Hague's OG underground scene, connected to Unit Moebius, Curley Esoteric, and Spiral Tribe's Network 23.
But she could never stop following her ears, and it was only a matter of time before they led her to London, where she joined the electrobass crew around Radioactive Man, Dexorcist and Audio Illusion. From there, her ears pulled her further still, into post-dubstep, and a deep love for the Bristol sound, opening up the path to the contemporary leftfield fusion of electronics she's known for today.
After a long hiatus, she's back behind the decks on a regular basis, making appearances at Club Laak and Future Intel, and running her biweekly K.O. Show on Radio Tonka / Den Haag FM. Endlessly restless and forever chasing that ultimate sound, she fuses her deep heritage of Bristol and Worldly percussion with pounding Bass and flowy Tek into an irresistible blend she calls Industrial Funk. Expect her to set the dancefloor alight.
wRec is a Rotterdam based project by DJ/producer duo DJ Shahmaran & Himera. Shifting between dark and light, harsh and tender, playful and vulnerable sounds, wRec; is a voyage into distilled dreams and lucid visions of hope amongst wreckage in the form of club music and soundscapes.
Animistic Beliefs are one of the most distinctive projects to emerge from Rotterdam’s electronic underground. Formed by Mara Lalihatu and Linh Luu, the queer Southeast Asian duo move through DJing, punk-charged hardware live sets, introspective records and theatrical work with a sound shaped by club music, diasporic memory and a taste for the unexpected. Few acts move as comfortably between clubs, museums and theatre stages as this radical Rotterdam pair.
Their DJ sets carry that open-ended musical identity into the club. As selectors, Animistic Beliefs move through global club sounds, breakbeats, UK bass, jersey club, footwork and bass-heavy electronics with curiosity and instinct. Their sets are playful, queer, sensual, high-energy and strange, guided less by genre purity than by a desire to move through the full range of human experience.
This versatility has taken Animistic Beliefs far beyond Rotterdam. Their live and DJ sets have connected with audiences physically and emotionally across Europe, East Asia and the Americas, with appearances at Rewire, Berlin Atonal, CTM, Dekmantel, MUTEK and Nuits Sonores. Their work has been covered by Resident Advisor, DJ Mag, Mixmag, Glamcult and VICE, with RA naming them a must-watch live act in its Breaking Through series; in the Netherlands, MERDEKA won the 3voor12 Award for Best Dutch Album.
Few musicians in techno work to sound like no other - Wallis is one of them. A producer, live act, and DJ, she constantly pushes her music into new realms, always searching for something new in a genre that can sometimes struggle to reinvent itself. More at ease building worlds in the studio than chasing the spotlight, her output is driven by obsession, detail, and pure creative instinct.
Her catalog speaks for itself: her DJ sets are packed with mostly her own unreleased material. While many follow trends, Wallis has carved a sound that feels hers unmistakably - unique, distinctive, and future-facing. She only cares about where her music was yesterday and how far she can push it tomorrow. Her recent releases Protect Me From My Friends and Goodbye Berlin deliver exactly that: a much-needed dose of originality in techno.
Wallis has toured across almost every continent, equally at home on a large stage or in a small, intimate, sweaty basement. She has played some of the world’s most respected techno spaces, including Berghain, Basement NYC, and Vent Tokyo, as well as festivals such as Sónar, Parklife, and Nuits Sonores. Beyond the club, she recently produced the music for the Natasha Zinko runway show at London Fashion Week.
Based in Rotterdam, DJ Easy B is closely linked to the Renegade ZMK Soundsystem and Move Around Sound. His sets combine breaks, UK bass, and techno into high-energy dancefloor fillers, always infused with a dose of subversive spirit. Following his acclaimed trilogy on the Double Cross XX label, he has just released his latest EP, Vendetta.
A key innovator in the 1990s Hardtec and Tribe scenes, 69db has been pushing the boundaries of live improvised sets since 1991. As a founding member of Spiral Tribe and R-Zac, he played a pivotal role in shaping the underground rave culture and co-founded Network 23 Recordings, a label that defined the sound of the free party movement in the 1990s. Today, Network 23 continues to inspire a new generation of hard techno producers.
The renewed interest in 90s hard techno has been reflected in record sales. In 2023 alone, 69db released four EPs on Berlin’s Sound Metaphors and a double EP, along with a five-record box set, on Rotterdam’s PRSPCT label — all of which sold out. Responding to this demand, he and his R-Zac partner, Crystal Distortion, launched the “23 Records or Bust!” series, reissuing 23 records from their 90s catalog. The first nine releases sold out in under a year, proving the timeless appeal of their work.
In early 2024, 69db debuted Rooted Sky under his new project, Wave Arising, in collaboration with movement specialist Kynsie Serre. This project blends ambient, tribal, experimental, and hard techno, further expanding his live improvisational approach. The Wave Arising Liveset by 69db, praised for its fusion of hard tribal techno with dub techniques, has already garnered critical acclaim, with Resident Advisor naming it one of the standout performances at Dekmantel 2024. 69db remains a force in electronic music, continuing to evolve his sound and inspire audiences worldwide.
Eric Parren (NL/US) is an interdisciplinary artist operating out of Helsinki. His practice includes the combined use of new and traditional digital and analog media, through which he investigates our understanding of the ideas and technologies that shape the future. Eric's works are often visceral, sensory experiences exploring modes of perception and the physics of light and sound. Informed by a deep knowledge of the histories of media arts, electronic music composition, and expanded cinema, his work makes links between the past, the present, and what is to come.
Eric is a Doctoral Researcher at Aalto University in the Department of Art and Media where he conducts research on artificial life, embodied cognition, and mechatronics. Previously he taught courses on programming and electronics for artists, realtime audiovisual systems, kinetic / light / sound art at NYU Shanghai, ArtCenter College of Design, and UCLA. He is a founding member of the art collective Macular and runs the experimental music show La Force Sauvage.
Eric studied at the Interfaculty ArtScience of the Royal Academy of Art and Royal Conservatory in The Hague, where he received his BFA in 2009. He went on to study at the Design Media Arts department of the University of California Los Angeles, where he was awarded his MFA in 2012. His works have been shown at galleries and festivals across Europe, North America, and Asia.
We rely on systems we hardly notice, until the lights go out or the network fails. But in those moments, another kind of knowledge arises: DIY solutions, forgotten analog technologies, and collective ways of making and being.
Off-Grid collects stories of protest infrastructures assembled in neighborhood yards and encrypted Telegram chats, internet cables stretched between apartment blocks, DIY practices, attempts to build a toaster from scratch, and a self-sustaining research capsule designed to operate for up to 120 days in isolation. This book moves across rural art institutions, repurposed power plants, exhibitions curated within forests and farmlands, and the early digital networks of the 1990s to explore what autonomy can mean in a world built on fragile, interconnected systems—and how much room for maneuver remains within them.
Katažyna Jankovska is a curator, writer, and researcher based between Rotterdam and Vilnius. Her practice focuses on ever-evolving relationships between humans, machines, and natural systems, with a particular interest in experimental art forms exploring sensory perception, digital culture, and the influence of technology on contemporary society.
Her work extends into publishing, including If a Tree Falls in a Forest, a book of conversations with artists exploring the limits of human perception and nonhuman sensoria, and Off-Grid, her recent book, which examines fragile infrastructures, self-organized networks, and forms of knowledge and autonomy that emerge when dominant systems fail. She works across writing, public programs, exhibitions, and editorial projects.
Besides presenting her installation 'The Shrine' at Katoenhuis as part of the exhibition Tactics for Cultural Resistance, Yara Mekawei will further expand on her artistic practice during an artist talk at the Conflux Conference at Keilepand.
Sonic sculptor, composer and scholar Yara Mekawei operates at the threshold, where urban pulse meets mythic echo, where Coptic breath and the Book of The Dead converge with algorithmic code. Ancient texts and scriptures are her music composition source.
She transmutes the ambient rhythms of cities, the liturgical whispers of Sufi antiquity, and the poetic geometries of esoteric texts into immersive divin-sonic architectures that dissolve borders between history and identity.
The auditory alchemy; a synesthetic ritual that turns sound into space, silence into structure. A chant’s glory, a kinetic installation. Breath, mapped as collective memory. This is transubstantiation, not translation. For Mekawei, sound is vessel, voyage, and verb: carrying ancestral wisdom, threading temporal layers, speaking across sensorial divides.
Phoebe Walton will present the methodologies, techniques and work of Forensis and Forensic Architecture (FA). During the lecture, she will share details of counter-forensic investigations, including the Police Killing of Sammy Baker in Amsterdam and the recently published analysis of the Police Killing of Ibrahima Barry in Mülheim (Germany). Through these cases and others, Phoebe will demonstrate how Forensis and FA construct visual and spatial evidence in collaboration with individuals and communities affected by state and corporate violence, and how they use political, cultural and legal forums to advance their demands for justice and accountability.
Also check the Forensic Architecture / Forensis works in the Conflux exhibition at Katoenhuis. Here you can see the Forensis video work Police Killing of Ibrahima Barry and the Forensic Architecture interactive work of Police Killing of Sammy Baker.
Phoebe Walton is a researcher at Forensis, an investigative agency that produces evidence of human rights violations. As the sister-organisation of Forensic Architecture, Forensis works with individuals and communities affected by state and corporate violence to support their demands for justice, reparations and accountability.
With a background in architecture, Phoebe conducts visual and spatial investigations, producing evidence for presentation in legal, political, and cultural forums. She has worked on cases of police brutality, violence towards migrants and refugees and the repression of pro Palestinian solidarity in Germany. With a feminist approach, Phoebe seeks to foreground marginalised voices, integrating technical and forensic methodologies with the situated knowledge of those at the forefront of a struggle.
Find more information about Forensic Architecture and Forensis below.
About Forensic Architecture
Forensic Architecture is an interdisciplinary research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London. We undertake spatial and media analysis for international prosecutors, human rights groups and NGOs. Our research is presented in political and legal forums, truth commissions, courts, and human rights reports, as well as in exhibitions and public events.
About Forensis
Forensis is Forensic Architecture’s Berlin-based sister agency. Forensis works for and in collaboration with individuals and communities affected by state and corporate violence, to support their demands for justice, reparations, and accountability.
Jerry Afriyie is a poet and the co-founder of Nederland Wordt Beter Foundation where he provides guest lectures on anti-Black racism and awareness-raising projects about the colonial and slavery past of the Netherlands. The foundation is committed to increasing knowledge about the impact of this history and providing educational materials to schools.
Mr. Afriyie coordinated the production and publication of a free-to-download curriculum on the history of colonialism and slavery to be used in classrooms throughout the Netherlands, from primary schools to universities. Companies, schools, and municipalities in the Netherlands call upon the organization’s expertise to combat everyday racism, social exclusion, and inequality. Nederland Wordt Beter was one of the main organizers of the Black Lives Matter protests in the Netherlands in 2020. Through the efforts of Jerry Afriyie, Nederland Wordt Beter and other anti-racist organizations, the government has acknowledged that institutional racism exists in the Netherlands. On December 19, 2022, the Dutch Prime Minister apologized for the Dutch Slavery past and on July 1, 2023, the Dutch King apologized for the Netherlands' historical involvement in slavery and the effects that it still has today.
Jerry Afriyie will take part in the panel 'What Do You Do When Everything You Do Is Not Enough?' A conversation on grief, empathy and spirituality in social justice activism between Camille Sapara Barton and Jerry Afriyie, moderated by Bambí Benkö.
What do you do when everything you do is not enough? is a Zen koan encountered during a Regenerative Activism course in Spain. What might this question mean in a time of genocide, ecocide, climate collapse, displacement, fascism and increasing repression of activism? And how might we understand agency when conventional forms of activism feel insufficient, or when the transformations we work towards extend beyond the timescale of an individual life?
This conversation brings together three perspectives on social engagement that reach beyond the immediate temporality of political tactics.
A central thread is grief work as a form of activism. Camille Sapara Barton, author of Tending Grief, brings a practice rooted in grief, embodiment, spirituality and cultures of care, inviting us to consider grief as a social and political practice in its own right.
Poet and activist Jerry Afriyie offers an inside perspective on 15 years of anti-racist struggle through his work with Nederland Wordt Beter, including The Kick Out Zwarte Piet and Black Lives Matter protests, guest lectures and educational materials addressing racism, social exclusion, inequality, and the colonial and slavery history of the Netherlands. His activism, alongside other anti-racist organisations, has contributed to governmental recognition of institutional racism in the Netherlands, as well as apologies made by the Dutch government and the King for the history and ongoing effects of slavery.
Bambí Benkö's practice is informed by creative direct action and disobedient pedagogies through the climate justice movement and Tools for Action. They also hold dreaming assemblies as a form of restful resistance.
Rather than seeking a definitive answer to the koan, the conversation opens a space for considering doubt, personal struggle, and the forms of inner, collective and spiritual wisdom that can carry us forward—not despite uncertainty and grief, but through them.
Camille Sapara Barton is a writer, embodiment social designer, advisor and DJ who creates resources or collective experiences that prototype embodied decolonisation and reconnection to the web of life. Camille’s work is grounded in Black Feminism, ecology, somatics and harm reduction. They are the author of Tending Grief: Embodied Rituals for Holding Our Sorrow and Growing Cultures of Care in Community (2024).
Camille Sapara Barton will take part in the panel 'What Do You Do When Everything You Do Is Not Enough?' A A conversation on grief, empathy and spirituality in social justice activism between Camille Sapara Barton and Jerry Afriyie, moderated by Bambí Benkö.
Find more information about this conversation below.
What do you do when everything you do is not enough? is a Zen koan encountered during a Regenerative Activism course in Spain. What might this question mean in a time of genocide, ecocide, climate collapse, displacement, fascism and increasing repression of activism? And how might we understand agency when conventional forms of activism feel insufficient, or when the transformations we work towards extend beyond the timescale of an individual life?
This conversation brings together three perspectives on social engagement that reach beyond the immediate temporality of political tactics.
A central thread is grief work as a form of activism. Camille Sapara Barton, author of Tending Grief, brings a practice rooted in grief, embodiment, spirituality and cultures of care, inviting us to consider grief as a social and political practice in its own right.
Poet and activist Jerry Afriyie offers an inside perspective on 15 years of anti-racist struggle through his work with Nederland Wordt Beter, including The Kick Out Zwarte Piet and Black Lives Matter protests, guest lectures and educational materials addressing racism, social exclusion, inequality, and the colonial and slavery history of the Netherlands. His activism, alongside other anti-racist organisations, has contributed to governmental recognition of institutional racism in the Netherlands, as well as apologies made by the Dutch government and the King for the history and ongoing effects of slavery.
Bambí Benkö's practice is informed by creative direct action and disobedient pedagogies through the climate justice movement and Tools for Action. They also hold dreaming assemblies as a form of restful resistance.
Rather than seeking a definitive answer to the koan, the conversation opens a space for considering doubt, personal struggle, and the forms of inner, collective and spiritual wisdom that can carry us forward—not despite uncertainty and grief, but through them.
Bambí Benkö is a Dutch-Hungarian artist, educator and dream worker with a focus on participatory performance and political intervention. In 2012, they founded Tools for Action, an art and activist collective that develops disobedient pedagogies and open-source tools for assembly and political action. Working across climate justice, anti-fascism and queer visibility, the collective creates spaces for resistance, solidarity and collective imagination.
Bambí Benkö will take part in the panel 'What Do You Do When Everything You Do Is Not Enough?' A conversation on grief, empathy and spirituality in social justice activism between Camille Sapara Barton and Jerry Afriyie, moderated by Bambí Benkö.
Find more information this conversation and about Tools for Action below.
Photo by Dani Hefter.
What do you do when everything you do is not enough? is a Zen koan encountered during a Regenerative Activism course in Spain. What might this question mean in a time of genocide, ecocide, climate collapse, displacement, fascism and increasing repression of activism? And how might we understand agency when conventional forms of activism feel insufficient, or when the transformations we work towards extend beyond the timescale of an individual life?
This conversation brings together three perspectives on social engagement that reach beyond the immediate temporality of political tactics.
A central thread is grief work as a form of activism. Camille Sapara Barton, author of Tending Grief, brings a practice rooted in grief, embodiment, spirituality and cultures of care, inviting us to consider grief as a social and political practice in its own right.
Poet and activist Jerry Afriyie offers an inside perspective on 15 years of anti-racist struggle through his work with Nederland Wordt Beter, including The Kick Out Zwarte Piet and Black Lives Matter protests, guest lectures and educational materials addressing racism, social exclusion, inequality, and the colonial and slavery history of the Netherlands. His activism, alongside other anti-racist organisations, has contributed to governmental recognition of institutional racism in the Netherlands, as well as apologies made by the Dutch government and the King for the history and ongoing effects of slavery.
Bambí Benkö's practice is informed by creative direct action and disobedient pedagogies through the climate justice movement and Tools for Action. They also hold dreaming assemblies as a form of restful resistance.
Rather than seeking a definitive answer to the koan, the conversation opens a space for considering doubt, personal struggle, and the forms of inner, collective and spiritual wisdom that can carry us forward—not despite uncertainty and grief, but through them.
Besides presenting her new work, Under Construction (Tactics for Cultural Resistance), Anne Wenzel will take part in the Conflux conference, where she will delve deeper into the concepts behind the work and her wider sculptural practice.
Anne Wenzel works on a strong and distinctive oeuvre of monumental ceramic sculptures and installations that are often placed in an accurately orchestrated setting. Wenzel takes a more subversive position between tradition and modernity. Departing from historical iconography, she tackles contemporary and often political themes by using a consciously chosen traditional medium: clay.
Out of a fascination for the language of heroism, she questions the manipulative force of nationalist architecture and sculpture. Investigating their formal language and history, Wenzel reinterprets the symbolic value by connecting it to current tendencies in political culture.
During the day, specifically from 14:00 to 18:00, there will be a walk-in workshop by (un)repair café.
Do you dig through trash only to find treasure? Are you interested in building servers? Do you take the shop out of Photoshop? Is a printer jam your kind of jam?
Have something specific you want to repair? Reach out via the link below
Cecile is a lecturer, curator, moderator, and artist. Her work operates at the intersection of debate, philosophy, and art. She is part of the artistic team of the new Rotterdam art space Social Art Platform and teaches in the Leisure & Events Management programme at the Willem de Kooning Academy. She regularly moderates at Debatpodium Arminius and hosts a radio show at Operator Radio.
15:00–16:30 — Panel talks by Cecile van Bruggen: Radio Resistance and What’s Up in the Hub?
15:00 - 15:45 — Radio Resistance with Pim (Operator Radio) Matthijs (Maxi Radio) and Bardo (Radio Tonka)
15:45 - 16:30 — What’s up in the Hub? With Underbelly, (un)repair café and visitor experience
Collectief Wasem is a collective founded by Elin Mensinga and Puck Wacki. With their shared interest in sound, the need for a stage for young sound makers emerged during their studies. By hosting performance nights, workshops, and now radio shows, they seek to get people actively listening to the versatility of sound and experimental music.
TYN is fuelled by an insatiable passion for everything cutting-edge. Driven by a curiosity for uncovering rare musical gems from obscure places, TYN takes listeners on unique journeys through unexplored soundscapes. His DJ sets are transformative experiences, revealing new auditory landscapes and pushing the limits of club culture. Rooted in the spirit of innovation and dipping from a vast pool of music, he pushes boundaries and seamlessly melds the future with echoes of the past.
Halte Charlois is an ongoing socio-cultural fashion project by fashion designer Nada van Dalen, created for and by the Charlois neighbourhood in Rotterdam. The aim of Halte Charlois is, in essence, simple: to capture Charlois as it is now, before it disappears beyond recognition in the tide of history.
Through ‘Halte Charlois’, Nada van Dalen aims to bring the people of Charlois together and strengthen their sense of community. A project that benefits the neighbourhood, the wider area and the people of Charlois. Capturing and documenting a Charlois identity that spans all generations. An identity that unites the people of Charlois with their streets, parks, shops and homes; that brings together the colourful characters and the local youth.
This talk will be moderated by Cecile van Bruggen.
Charlois Fashion Week is the annual event at which everything that Halte Charlois sees, does and creates is showcased to the general public. This year, CFW will take place from 1 to 10 October. Over the course of nine days, various programme elements will be on display at different venues:
An exhibition, a musical tour of the neighbourhood featuring various performances, the Charlois Film Festival, an auction of the Halte Charlois 2025 collection, the Charlois Fashion Show in collaboration with La Cassette, and finally an after-party at Export.
Ash is a visual artist and radiomaker from Aotearoa New Zealand. She listens for the voice as a hinge between the physical material of the body, and the unreliable social fabric of language.
As a multi-colour laser beam enters a soap bubble (the chemical ancestor of a living cell’s lipid membrane), it splits into microscopic optical branches. Unlike other light sources, the laser's coherent emission gets trapped inside a bubble’s skin, carving out filamentous pathways along which the light propagates unperturbed. During the performance, these laser branches meander through clusters of hemispherical bubbles, which serve as molecule-thin lenses for a 360° laser projection. The projection envelopes the audience in an unfathomable magnification of the electrochemical and optofluidic dynamics within the sensitive skin of a bubble.
Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand create multisensory installations and performances that merge the physical sciences with uncanny philosophical practices. Investigating questions of perception and perpetuity, their artworks exist as ever- transforming phenomena offered for observation. The immediacy of this experience allows the observer to transcend the illusory distinction between scientific discovery and perceptual expansion.
The duo’s practice has emerged through collaborations with pioneering research groups, including LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory), EU Quantum Flagship, and Aerospace Engineering (TU Delft). They are recipients of the Witteveen+Bos Award (2019), Meru Art*Science Award (2018), Japan Media Arts Excellence Prize (2007) and five Ars Electronica Honorary Mentions (2007, 2009, 2011, 2013, 2017). Domnitch and Gelfand have exhibited at Martin-Gropius-Bau (Berlin), the Venice Biennial, MAXXI Museum of 21st Century Art (Rome), Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art (Helsinki) and the National Museum of Modern Art (Tokyo).
First presented as a newly commissioned performance at one of the inaugural Klankvorm events at V2_ in 2017, Dante’s Circle returns in a new iteration at Conflux 2026, with a site-specific composition developed for the concrete Cathedral of Brutus.
Dante’s Circle is a kinetic and visceral performance by Nicky Assmann and Robert Pravda for six monolithic burners arranged in a circle around a rotating loudspeaker and played as a live instrument.
The automated burners move vertically along the copper panels, heating them and creating continuously changing prismatic colours. The sounds of the burners and heated copper plates become a source for the soundscape, moving through the installation and projected into the space by the kinetic speaker at its centre. The copper plates function both as screens for the iridescent visuals and as acoustic reflectors.
The rotating speaker and the circular choreography of stroboscopic lights, fumes and shadows extend the circle into the architecture of the Cathedral of Brutus. As artefacts of the performance, six uniquely burned, iridescent copper plates remain.
Nicky Assmann
Nicky Assmann is a Rotterdam-based artist known for her large scale installations in which she composes with natural phenomena such as light, motion, and colour, forming a spatial and sensory experience. With a background in Film and ArtScience, she combines artistic, scientific and cinematographic knowledge in experiments that use physical and chemical processes, such as turbulence and fluid dynamics. In the lineage of expanded cinema, she makes her own film screens using materials such as glass, copper sheets, soap film, reflective surfaces, colour, and kinetic elements. She creates poetic environments that explore the space in between the physical and the sensory.
Robert Pravda
Robert Pravda is a sound artist, performer, and instrument builder whose practice explores the physical and spatial qualities of sound through performance, installation, and experimental instrument design. He studied engineering at the Technical University of Novi Sad (former Yugoslavia) from 1987 to 1991, after which he became active in experimental underground music scenes. His interest in interdisciplinary art led him to the Interfaculty Image & Sound in The Hague, where he graduated in 2002 and later joined the teaching team. Since then, he has combined teaching with the development of experimental instruments for multimedia performances and the creation of algorithmic compositions for spatial sound and light installations.
A vegan, straight edge noise project of Masami Akita from Japan. Merzbow started out in the noise industrial scene of early 1980s and began releasing music. In the 1990s, Merzbow were influenced by grind core and released an album on the death metal label Relapse. In the late 1990s, he resonated with Mego's "punk computer music" and were one of the first in Japanese Noise Scene to adopt a live performance technique using laptop computers.
Since around 2003, he has practiced veganism from the perspective of "animal rights." He creates works on themes such as "anti-whaling," "anti-dolphin fishing," "anti-fur," and "liberation of livestock animals." In recent years, he has been creating music that is not limited to digital or analog. Recently, he has been experimenting with incorporating AI into album artwork.
He has also collaborated with Balazs Pandi, Mats Gustafsson, Thurston Moore, Boris, Keiji Haino, Richard Pinhas (Heldon), Duenn, Nyantra, Lawrence English, Xiu Xiu, Gezan, Alessandro Cortini, Vanity Productions, Vatican Shadow, Bastard Noise, Meat Beat Manifesto and others.
Puck and Sou treat sonic making as a process of interaction, something that emerges through relating and responding with movement and uncertainty in the realm of modular synthesis. They bring together two practices rooted in listening, improvisation, and live electronic performance, where music lives in the space between body and machine. Alongside the modular system, Puck works with guitar strings and electromagnetic activation, bringing physical resonance into the electronic soundscape. Instruments are patched, probed, and drawn into response, creating a performance that takes shape as a feedback loop through the negotiation between the body’s organic clock and the internal time of the systems.
Puck Wacki
Puck Wacki is an interdisciplinary artist and musician based in Rotterdam, active in Rotterdam and The Hague. In their artistic practice, they explore how people relate to human-designed systems and machines, including abstract constructs such as time. In their performances, Wacki dissects and manipulates machines to explore and redefine their meaning by placing them in new contexts and functions. These performances operate at the intersection of sound art, experimental music, and installation, revealing the tension between the technical and the musical.
Sou
Sou is a composer and sound artist from Macau with a live electronics practice in modular synthesis and feedback-based instruments. His music often comes from repurposing sound processes, an act of translation guided by active listening. As half of the electronic music project Faslane, he has performed internationally at Lausanne Underground Film and Music Festival, Dao Xuan Arts Festival in Vietnam, Kill The Silence Festival in Macau, and independent venues such as Twenty Alpha in Hong Kong.
Gonçalo Almeida’s double bass solo performance is a research and development of the musical ideas explored in his album Ciclos, focusing on sound, repetition, and texture. In this solo setting, Almeida explores the full sonic range of the double bass, combining acoustic playing with a subtle use of amplification and light.
The performance focuses on lengthy structures and the slow development of musical concepts, reflecting on the nature of time, structure, and control. It uses the raw sound of the double bass and its ability to produce a wide range of textures, from quiet harmonics and resonances to deep drones and sharp percussive attacks. Through repetition and subtle shifts in timbre and dynamics, Almeida explores how small changes in sound can gradually transform the perception of the instrument and the space around it.
The result is an immersive yet grounded performance, centred on the physical presence of the double bass and its capacity to fill, shape, and transform a space.
Concepción Huerta is a multidisciplinary artist with a strong background in audiovisual media and a deep focus on sound. Her practice spans sound design, video installations, spatialized concerts, speculative narratives, and immersive experiences.
Her approach to sound begins with an exploration of the relationship between silence and noise, political space, and sound as a means of enunciation. She investigates resonance, acoustic space, and the physical and psychological impact of sound in relation to the listener.
Her sonic explorations are rooted in recordings of everyday objects and instruments such as synthesizers, which she manipulates through tape recorders and processed tapes to create atmospheres influenced by ambient and noise. Rather than fitting within a specific musical genre, her sound works construct imagined narratives and immersive sonic worlds.