2025 ~ Meditations#13 ~ four students

The following text was commissioned by the DAI and will be offered to the Accreditation Panel 2025 (see also DAI's Self Evaluation Report 2025 as requested by the NVAO). Olfa Arfaoui (DAI, 2026), Tara White (DAI, 2026), Muyang Teng (DAI, 2026) and Alva Roselius (DAI, 2025) were invited to collectively write an assesment of the DAI, measured against the so-called standards as prescribed by The Assessment Framework for the Higher Education Accreditation System of the Netherlands. 

"Every Language Is Another Language's Dream" is composed of four reflections by students 2023-2026 on four key elements of the program: roaming, core curriculum, artistic praxis, and educational outcomes. Drawing on their individual experiences of the dynamic and multifaceted entity that is the Dutch Art Institute (DAI), they give a holistic description of a program that is both the sum of and more than its constituent parts. 

Every Language Is Another Language's Dream

Humans have travelled to seek knowledge since the dawn of time. The DAI, as a roaming academy, shapes its modus operandi through movement, praxis, collaboration, and a critical reflection on contemporary art, theory, and beyond. Learning at the DAI is not confined within walls; it expands through landscapes, encounters, and the constant reconfiguring of thought in response to place.

I recall the case of Ibn Battuta, the great medieval Moroccan traveler who spent nearly 30 years journeying across Africa, the Middle East, India, and China in search of knowledge, experience, and wisdom. He had a life shaped by movement, his learning carried by the rhythm of his footsteps. The Sakakini school followed a similar path, embracing the Socratic peripatetic method of walking as a way to think, discuss, and reshape ideas.^[1] In these pedagogical traditions, knowledge was not something fixed—it was something discovered in motion, shaped by dialogue, sharpened by encounter.

I have always been drawn to movement. As a child, I hated walls—I saw them as barriers to my curiosity. In the rare moments I could be alone my soul could slip out of the window and roam. I dreamt of travelling across continents, meeting new people, and absorbing stories like a sponge. My body was too small to contain the vastness of my longing, and so I carried my desire to move deep within me.

If the DAI were not a roaming academy, I wouldn’t be here. I was first introduced to the program in March 2020 by a DAI student who reached out to me via social media to learn more about my curatorial practice on preserving sonic cultural heritage from a feminist perspective. This led to an invitation to attend the Roaming Assembly #27 in Tunis, where I had the opportunity to meet other students and gain deeper insight into the academy’s modus operandi and curriculum. The Roaming Assembly is a one-day public event curated with local practitioners and hosted by the DAI to introduce itself in new settings. The session I attended showcased the work of Tunisian visual artist Ali Tnani, who explored themes of erasure and absence within narratives of memory, traces, and history in an era of hyper-connectivity, focusing on the community of Chenini in southern Tunisia. I realized then that this was the kind of educational program I had been searching for. One that wasn’t confined to a single institution, but rather moved, shifted, and expanded—much like my own restless curiosity.

Each DAI Week (also known as a Confluence) takes place in a different location, bringing together a new constellation of “external” contributors (thinkers, artists, and cultural workers, etc.). These encounters serve as an invitation to explore space-time relationships shaped by socio-political and economic structures, as well as their materialization in the environments we are operating in. The DAI program mirrors the real yet complex world we navigate as artists, scholars, and/or curators. Learning happens not in isolation but through dialogues - with structures, institutions, and each other. Our conversations begin in seminar rooms and spill into late-night discussions over meals, reshaping themselves in whispers, arguments, and shared silences. To roam is to learn. To move is to be challenged. The DAI is an education program that demands presence—physical, intellectual, and emotional. It is a program where one does not simply study contemporary art but questions its conditions of production, its politics and its possibilities for emancipation and being situated. 

The DAI is not just a Master’s program; it is a method of existence—a way of thinking and practicing through roaming. It is designed for those who refuse to be contained, for those whose learning unfolds not within walls but through the journey itself.

The DAI curriculum is uniquely adaptive to its cohort of students, staff and the socio-political climate that we orbit within. In an artworld that expects artists to predominantly produce within studios, the DAI uncovers how much work is done by artists outside of these settings, enabling us to develop our practices with sincerity. We are assessed at every stage of the course on how we present, listen, organise, analyse, write and make connections. It surfaces the all encompassing nature of art-making, teasing out the criticality, sensitivity and detail-oriented sensibilities of artists.

The DAI curriculum embraces experimental and multidisciplinary forms of learning, sharing and creating. Kitchens are generous and generative twenty-minute presentations given twice a year by each student, to share and crucially test new work in front of a captive audience. Students collectively listen to each other’s constructive evaluation from two external respondents. These are invaluable moments for students to be acquainted with artists and art workers beyond their colleagues at the DAI from early on. Multiple suggestions for possible endings of my performance arose from my Kitchen responses, opening up questions of how we equip an audience to leave an emotional space. These multifaceted perspectives enriched my understanding of the variety of impacts my work can make in different contexts. 

This is also reflected in the Planetary Campus, i.e. each individual who permeates the programme becomes part of a global network of thinkers. By living together throughout the Confluences, students develop their work by receiving ongoing informal and layered feedback beyond a designated time. This varied peer-to-peer learning environment forges a receptive and respectful manner when receiving constructive criticism. Writing Weaver reports offer students the opportunity to reflect on each confluence and for faculty to monitor our trajectory within the programme. We evaluate the interwoven impacts of the course on our personal practice and highlight future goals for further development.

COOPs are inherently collaborative research groups co-facilitated by international researchers, artists and curators. My group, Curating Positions: Voz de Tierra hosts a film club between Confluences to remain in touch and share independent research outside of class. After each confluence, students submit Chronicles, multi-media assignments that present amalgamated intersections of research, interests and reflections in relation to the group’s findings. 

How To Do Things With Theory seminars are guided by one tutor throughout the two-year programme, fostering critical thinking and written skills to ultimately produce a Master’s thesis. This involves closely reading/watching academic texts and films, followed by analytical discussion. These sessions are important guides for us to situate our work amongst the current socio-political climate, informing the future whilst paying close attention to the past and its impact on the present. Students are encouraged to recommend material rooted in personal interest, bolstering the group’s investigation and refining their own approach to research, methodology and artistic/academic expression.

Factory sessions are designated student-led activities experimenting with arts programming, often as audio-visual or participatory workshops. This is a valuable opportunity to test socially engaged practices without being tethered to institutional objectives and partaking in each other’s diverse practices. All elements of the curriculum are blended during these sessions, learning from each other and forging space to uplift the spectrum of voices represented at the DAI. The General Assembly is dedicated time organised by the student body to support and empower each other to contribute to the programme by addressing questions about our study trajectory through discussion. These sessions are responsive containers for collectively identifying strategies to continuously refine the course to benefit current and future cohorts depending on our needs.

When familiar reference points disappeared, I needed new navigation tools, much like the protagonist in Kobo Abe’s “The Ruined Map” who seeks alternative ways to orient himself when conventional maps fail. Through the DAI’s partnerships with SAVVY Contemporary and in Grant Watson’s “Queer Forms” seminar, I encountered methodologies that flow beyond Eurocentric boundaries. These methods helped me anchor my practice in contemporary art while embracing Yuk Hui’s concept of “Post-Europe”—moving beyond simple East-West divisions toward the possibility of creating new forms of (un)belonging in a world where “homelessness” has become our shared condition. 

At the DAI, I bridged my disconnect between theory and practice. Through SAVVY Contemporary’s COOP, we studied the Medu Art Ensemble’s anti-apartheid resistance, seeing theory as a “living archive” linking historical struggles with contemporary movements. Their transnational approach and “culture as a weapon” mantra showed art’s direct role in social change. “Queer Forms” exposed me to experimental texts by Kathy Acker, Samuel R. Delany, and other transgressive authors. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “paranoid versus reparative reading” became a tool helping me recognize Cold War binaries while imagining alternatives. 

My poetry collection “Bearly Itch” demonstrates how the DAI prepared me to sustain creative practice amid complexity. Deconstructing “China” (中国) into “Middle+Nation” (中+国) to reveal meanings like “neutral+homeland” or “mediocre+hate” emerged from political language strategies I developed in my COOP. This approach questioned national identity while opening artistic possibilities. In my poem exploring how “gay” in Sichuan’s dialect is called “飘飘”, I traced how this word unfolds its layers of meaning—“float,” “drift,” and “haunt”—mapping a queer diasporic identity. Through a combination of different courses, analytical approaches transformed into creative language bridging the long Cold War framework with my lived experiences between China and the Netherlands.

During my studies, I encountered Yuk Hui’s concept of language as a “magic tongue” that connects us to our origins while helping us dissolve boundaries. This inspired my own multilingual experiments like “每种语言都是另一种语言的dream” (every language is another language’s dream), embracing the idea that “the tongue is where contradictions meet.” These practices reflect the DAI’s emphasis on productive failure and unexpected outcomes—skills increasingly valued in professional contexts.

The linguistic practices I developed at the DAI honor cultural specificity while creating productive displacements that generate alternative forms of solidarity across differences. As COOP tutor Mokia Dinnyuy Manjoh noted: “The system of colonization was international,” so decolonial artistic responses must cross borders. During my Kitchen presentation, I shared provocative poems—a shift from my visual art background. The invited respondents Edwin Nasr and Ashkan Sepahvand praised my strategic self-orientalization and ability to balance tender family moments with confrontational responses to the white gaze. Their recognition built my confidence as an emerging writer. 

At the DAI, I can keep voicing with my twisted tongue—transforming boundaries into mirrors and weaving connections across divided geographies and histories.

The DAI heavily focuses on research and theory-based forms of critical artistic articulation. Still, I have never encountered an educational context that appreciates the doing so much. Students are encouraged to try out new formats and methods, pushing their artistic practice in their desired direction, which nurtures experimentalism and collaboration. 

There is an instability that comes with not having one fixed place that does, at the end of the day, mirror the life of an artist—especially a non-commercial one. With its roaming structure, the DAI closely resembles the world we, as artists, must enter after finishing school. Learning to find balance within that uncertainty has become one of the most valuable skills I’ve developed at the DAI. Moreover, getting to know various residencies, institutions, and venues during the Confluences has been indispensable for navigating life outside of an academic context. Many of these places I will return to in the future, while others have inspired me with new ways of organising projects and spaces. 

At the end of the two years, three key elements are presented: the AEROPONIC ACTS, a large-scale individual artistic presentation; the COOP Summit, a group project spanning the course of the year; and the Master’s thesis. Each one of these elements demonstrates different facets of the graduate's development. The AEROPONIC ACTS, which can also be understood as the final Kitchen but presented in a large venue such as Centrale di Fies in Dro, Italy, is one of the key moments where students must demonstrate their ability to independently steer their working process towards a public conclusion with curatorial and technical assistance. As a first year student, being part of and witnessing the presentations of the year above was constructive preparation, as were our individual meetings with Quinsy Gario, who helped us reflect on our Kitchen presentations thus far. Similarly, Life after DAI takes place during final preparations for AEROPONIC ACTS, offering soon-to-be graduates an opportunity to speak with alumni about future plans and seek professional counsel on the crucial next steps in their artistic careers 

The Master’s thesis reflects the individual student’s interests and intellectual trajectory. Each student delivers a written piece that demonstrates independent thought, critical engagement, and original research. Finally, the COOP Summit offers an opportunity to practice artistic compromise and consensus-building. The group collectively decides how to present the work they’ve developed throughout the year, often in site-specific settings, negotiating the final public output with local partners and resources.

Now, with only six months to go until graduation, I am deep in the thesis writing process, establishing new collaborative relationships within my COOP as we begin to hatch tentative plans for this year’s COOP Summit in Nicosia, Cyprus, and slowly preparing for the grand finale of AEROPONIC ACTS in August. The friendships I’ve forged, the memories I’ve collected, and the experiences I’ve embodied have shaped me into a more resilient and focused artist. Personal growth has been a key part of this journey—one that extends far beyond technical skills and intellectual knowledge, offering a deeper understanding of my artistic identity. Looking back, I feel immense gratitude for the program’s ability to not only challenge me but to support me at every stage of this process. The DAI has prepared me not just for the culmination of my academic journey, but for a life beyond, with the confidence, curiosity, and skills necessary to navigate the complex realities of the (art) world.

Authors: Olfa Arfaoui, Tara White, Muyang Teng, Alva Roselius 

Sounding board: Sara Alberani, Jip van der Hek & Raphael Daibert

Coordination: Sam Mountford