Events
WCSCD 2025/2026 educational program lecture series

Assembling Land: Rehearsals towards Placemaking
Marina Christodoulidou
Time September 19th 2025, 19:00
Venue: SKUP Novi Sad
Delving into pressing themes surrounding Land —particularly its ownership and use— de Appel takes curatorial practice as a means of commoning. Land represents the frontline for critical issues such as environmental crises, land grabbing, settler colonialism, and the erosion of affordable housing, among others. In the present context of late capitalism, Land has been reduced to a mere commodity, stripped of its intrinsic value and communal significance. Yet, we witness a surge of political and social movements worldwide fervently advocating for equitable access to and restitution of land and its resources. Artists, often at the forefront of these struggles, are not merely participants but conspirators, exploring and embodying new paradigms of shared ownership and reimagining the commons.
Curatorial projects referenced during the talk engage with co-ownership, both as a structure and a concept, by learning from the diverse experiences, practices, and perspectives of/with lumbung. It further questions how crises of land and housing engage with an art institution, and asks: how could we co-own a place? How might an art institution practice co-ownership, both practically and poetically? In principle, de Appel anchors its inquiries in curatorial work: How can we curate exhibitions today in relation to concerns about land and urban crises? How might art institutions contribute to social housing movements and struggle against land grabbing and individual ownership?
Following the presentation, there will be a screening of the collaborative film The Broken Pitcher (2022), which situates such questions in relation to a case of a home foreclosure, and by extension, debt and property, while exploring potentials for changing the script by interacting with it.
Marina Christodoulidou is mentor of WCSCD educational program 2025/2026 and she the lecture is organized as part of educational program public encounters in collaboration with SKUP and Sok Cooperative
The public lecture by Marina Christoulidou is supported by the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Belgrade.
Lecture will be in English

Marina Christodoulidou is a curator and researcher based in Amsterdam. Her practice traverses curatorial formats, often taking shape as discursive exhibitions, film, writing, and spatial interventions. During her participation in the 2023 de Appel Curatorial Programme, together with her cohort, she engaged in collective working methods that explored curating as a collaborative, situated practice. Their shared inquiry culminated in Hope is a Discipline, an ongoing curatorial research project named after the words of Mariame Kaba, who frames hope as a practice of communal labor. The research began with a series of gatherings at Broedplaats LELY in Amsterdam (October 6 – November 23, 2023) and continued at LMCC Arts Center in New York City (July 29 – September 29, 2024), with future iterations to follow. In October 2024, the cohort launched a vinyl record documenting the process and its encounters, published by de Appel Amsterdam.
Marina continues her affiliation with de Appel as a curatorial fellow, working across various projects and initiatives, and as tutor of de Appel’s COOP study program at the Dutch Art Institute (DAI), alongside artist Noor Abuarafeh. Now in its third consecutive year, the COOP study group is framed under Rehearsals towards Placemaking, with public offerings by each year’s cohort as part of the DAI Summit, which travels across geographies—from Morocco to Cyprus and beyond. As part of the grounding of de Appel’s new home at Temple in De Pijp, Amsterdam, Marina’s collaborative project The Broken Pitcher was presented during the housewarming events in Spring 2024.
Among other ongoing collaborations with de Appel’s team is Our People are Our Mountains, initiated in partnership with the 50th Jakarta Biennial. The project spans exhibitions, workshops, and performances in both Jakarta and Amsterdam, inviting artists to activate personal and collective transmissions in Fall 2024. At de Appel, participating artists and collectives shared instructions with the public and with their counterparts in Jakarta. This initiative centers on an act of transmission and trust—artists convey their creative directives to peers in Jakarta, who in turn interpret, enact, or respond to the instructions in place. While it includes exhibitionary elements, the project is fundamentally a collective, process-based endeavor, dependent on activation beyond the confines of presentation formats.
In the upcoming exhibition calendar, December 2025 marks a new iteration of The Broken Pitcher (2020–), a long-term collaborative project that re-enacts an eviction story shaped by the colonial history of debt. For this occasion, Marina is working closely with artists involved in the original project, as well as newly commissioned collaborators, to draw from narratives rooted in the Dutch landscape. The work has previously been presented in public squares across Cyprus, as well as at Thkio Ppalies (Nicosia), Beirut Art Center, GfZK (Leipzig), and Lenbachhaus (Munich), among others.