Alan Dearling’s personal article about the 7th Futurologic Symposium on Free Cultural Spaces, ADM, Amsterdam, October 2017
5:20 pm in articles, event, FCS Symposium, FCS Symposium 2017 at ADM by Alan Dearling
Venturing into the lesser known…
With Gonzo magazine’s, Alan Dearling
Four days of talks, films, fire, fun, music, theatre and festi activities at the last major non-legalised squat, ADM, in Amsterdam’s Westport
Squatters first moved into the ‘contested’ derelict, old shipbuilding area of Amsterdamsche Droogdok Maatschappij (ADM, aka, the Amsterdam Drydock Company) something like 27 years ago when shipbuilding was abandoned at ADM. It was after all shipbuilding activities finally halted in 1997, and the previously buoyant shipbuilding industry located at the merged ADM and NDSM yards foundered, that a second wave of artists, musicians, and other creative folk moved onto the ADM site. It became their innovative, often magical playground – their creative home.
The ADM residents describe it as:
“The largest and oldest creative freehaven in the Netherlands…arising from the longing to experiment…we improvise with time and money, test our place in the ecosystem, tinker with human relationships and build sculptures, compositions, heat sources and means of transport using an other’s waste. It is a niche in the margin of organised society. A laboratory where the arrangement of our daily lives is practised as an art form, where the development of simple, sustainable solutions are automatic and innovation is not trendy, but pure necessity.”
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