The Diary as Feminist Genre 2025

New series of workshops in October and November

  • Sketches for Gardening: Rosa Luxemburg and Botany

    11 october 13:00 – 16:00 uur

    Language: English

    This workshop departs from the private herbarium of socialist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, a diary of various plant species compiled between 1913 and her assassination in 1919. Connecting the social, historical and botanical layers of these diaries, the herbarium offers insight into the relationships between people and environments. During this workshop we will walk through the environment of I Can’t Dance to reflect on the plant life around the historic hospital at the WG-terrein (Wilhelmina Gasthuis) and consider its relations to our everyday rituals and ways of living today.

    HOST

    Milena Bonilla is a visual artist born in Bogotá, living and working in Amsterdam. She is interested in practices and knowledge that propose and place particular questions about language and agency as ontological properties exclusive to humans, and how this precept is embedded in the way in which economic policies under capitalism operate. This perspective is informed by research on epistemic diversity and its colonial conditioning, as well as by notions on art as medicine.

    This workshop is co-organized with If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution.

  • Love & Lightning: A Collection of Queer-Feminist Manifestos

    12 oktober 13:00 – 15:00 uur

    Language: Nederlands

    Met het boek Love and Lightning: A Collection of Queer and Feminist Manifestos (september 2025) als vertrekpunt, staan in deze workshop de overeenkomsten tussen dagboeken en manifesten centraal. Deze twee genres lijken misschien elkaars tegenpolen, maar wie ze beter bestudeert ontdekt veel overeenkomsten. In het eerste deel van deze workshop lezen we samen een aantal feministische manifesten. In het tweede gedeelte schrijven we onze eigen teksten. Je wordt uitgenodigd om te experimenteren met verschillende registers, van het persoonlijke en ongefilterde van dagboeken, tot het collectieve en activerende van het manifest.

    HOST

    Sarah van Binsbergen (1987) is freelance journalist, kunstcriticus en redacteur. Ze is co-redacteur (met Jessica Gysel, Sara Kaaman en Liz Allan) van het boek Love and Lightning: A Collection of Queer and Feminist Manifestos, dat uitkomt bij Valiz in samenwerking met het tijdschrift Girls Like Us. Van Binsbergen schrijft voor de Volkskrant over hedendaagse kunst, en droeg daarnaast bij aan diverse kunsttijdschriften en boeken. Vanuit haar achtergrond in culturele politicologie en antropologie is ze met name geïnteresseerd in de relatie tussen kunst en sociale ontwikkelingen. In 2018 won ze de Prijs voor Jonge Kunstkritiek. Ze woont en werkt in Amsterdam.

    Deze workshop is een samenwerking met Uitgeverij Valiz.

  • Domestic Notes: Curious Gestures

    19 oktober 13:00 – 15:00 uur

    Language: English

    This workshop will take as a starting point Nuraini Juliastuti’s long-term publishing project Domestic Notes (2018-ongoing). Assembling notes, photos, lists, and recipes, Domestic Notes looks at domestic and migrant spaces as sites to discuss everyday politics, the organisation of makeshift support systems, trivial matters, and gestures that are often overpowered by the usual formulas for productivity and stability. After two editions on food and traveling, the upcoming issue will focus on women stories — our collective sisters, mothers, aunties, grandmothers — and the methods for trans-local mourning. The workshop will exercise the sensibility to train our bodies and identify various non-places and non-spaces to learn and make sense differently.

    HOST

    Nuraini Juliastuti is a trans-local practicing researcher and writer, focusing on art organisations, activism, illegality, alternative cultural production, vernacular archiving, and contemporary bestiaries. In 1999, Nuraini co-founded Kunci Study Forum & Collective in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Since 2016, Kunci has established the long-term project School of Improper Education. Nuraini develops Domestic Notes, a publication-based project that takes domestic and migrant spaces as sites to discuss everyday politics, the organisation of makeshift support systems, and women archives. With her family, Nuraini runs a small press, Reading Sideways Press, which publishes works and translations on the intersections of contemporary art, sports culture, literature, sound and other pressing matters.

    This workshop is co-organized with If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution.

  • FINSTA: A Biological Woman Perspective

    26 oktober

    Language: English

    In this workshop, Alma Noor invites you to join her in understanding the relevance of finstas for modern day women: from memes to rants to a tool of archiving & maybe surviving womanhood? The workshop will start with a presentation about the history of finstas through a global (not really) and a personal lens. Then you’ll be invited to connect some dots between your finsta content, experiment with the ephemerality of online diaries, and post like instagram won’t see the light of day.

    HOST

    Alma Noor is a DJ, researcher and sometimes writer based in Amsterdam. As a being in transition, her artistic expression and practice revolves around documenting, celebrating, and protecting her experience and those who might share a similar one (IG @youngw0man). She is also one third of the Los Angles collective and the founder of Don’t Go We Will Fund Them.

    This workshop is co-organized with Los Angles.

  • Who Loves the Eunuch? Is It You? Do You Have What It Takes?

    9 november

    Language: English

    In this workshop historical events and characters will be used as a playground for diarywriting. Odete invites you to a workshop where historical events and characters become vessels for imagining your own future. With this in mind, the workshop will be focused on writing that happens in the moment before you speak or do something: writing meant to guide you, as those little notes you scribble before an important conversation. What could happen if you had to write a love diary for Baruch Spinoza, a coming out letter by Portugal’s missing king D.Sebastião, or even a supermarket list for Joan D’Arc ? And what could be written in the notes of the most famous speeches of history?

    HOST

    Odete is a writer, performer and DJ. In her work she uses paranoia and erotics as somatic ways to relate to archival materials. Lately she has been building connection points between “effeminate” histories, from the baroque Castrati to the 19th century dandies. Her forthcoming book, which touches on eunuchism through auto-theory and historical fiction writing, will be published by Amsterdam-based independent publisher OUTLINE.

    This workshop is co-organized with Outline.

Post Office

All workshops except for the first one (Milena) will be at Post Office: an experiment for sharing space in Amsterdam West. The workshops are supported by Woorden van West, Gemeente Amsterdam and free for participants.

If you are curious to do more diary writing, learn about Woorden van West or to join Post Office on a more steady basis, The Diary as Feminist Genre also hosts ‘Public Friday’ on Friday 3,10,17 and 26 October and Friday 8 November between 13.00-17.00. You are welcome to drop by.