Invitation to Actions: Ensembling, Sincering, Transmitting ~ Tuesday, June 24 from 13:30 till 15:30 ~ COOP SUMMIT 2025
“One who calls their kin to a feast does not do so to save them from starving. They all have food in their own homes. When we gather together in the moonlit village ground, it is not because of the moon. Everyone can see it in their own compound. We come together because it is good to do so.”—Chinua Achebe
We invite you to join us—not out of urgency, but because gathering matters. We are the 2024–2025 COOP study group An Invitation to Action – A Basis for Hope—cultural workers from Honduras, Greece, China, Brazil, Canada, Indonesia, Italy, Nigeria, and Cameroon. Over the past year, we’ve been following the traces of the Medu Art Ensemble, learning how culture can challenge the systems that try to contain it. From Nida’s quiet forests to the buffer zone in Nicosia, we’ve been listening. Practicing Harney and Thompson’s slow reading, walking until silence taught us something, tuning into the fading signals of Radio Alice and Free Radio Algeria. We’ve tried to do as Pauline Oliveros once suggested: “walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears.”
What we offer here is simple: radio as a weapon, feast as gathering, a newsletter as a place to hold what can’t be held elsewhere. These transmissions carry temper—not rage that explodes, but the warmth that sustains. Like Mutabaruka’s Every Time A Ear De Soun, our voices loop and overlap, building echoes out of what was left unsaid. Fanon once wrote that we must use the past to open the future. To visit the ruins and to understand them as a site of rebirth, as an impetus for action. That’s what this is. No projections. No spectacle. Just voices that insist on staying, food shared as quiet resistance, and stories printed with the urgency of people who still believe in speaking.
Be with us. Come together—not because you have to, but because it’s good to do so.
Join COOP study group An Invitation to Action - A Basis for Hope at State Gallery of Contemporary Art - SPELin Nicosia on the island of Cyprus for
Invitation to Actions: Ensembling, Sincering, Transmitting
Student participants: Christelle Makris, Echo Guo, Fagner Lima, Liam Warren, Muyang Teng, Qiaoling Cai, Ratri Notosudirdjo, Sara Alberani, and Zhuang Leng.
Tutor participants: Leo Asemota, Mokia Dinnyuy Manjoh (with guest AMULETO MANUELA).
Invitation to Actions: Ensembling, Sincering, Transmitting is realized through the ongoing friendship, conversation and collaboration between the Dutch Art Institute and:
evolving into an offering
on Tuesday, June 24 from 13:30 till 15:30
as part of COOP SUMMIT 2025.
Collective departure from SPEL at 13:00.
Read more about the trajectory of COOP study group An Invitation to Action - A Basis for Hope.