2025: WORM: Hello, Ultimate Playground!

New year’s address: from WORM co-directors, Charlien Adriaenssens and Teun de Booij.

Firstly: Happy New Year from all of us at WORM! We want to thank all our hard-working colleagues and all our supporters for their dedication. Every one of you plays a vital role to keep WORM crackle, bleep, develop, flourish and shapeshift. 

Looking back: We have much to be proud of: in 2024 we celebrated 25 years of ‘WORMing around’, and produced a unique programme that is as multidisciplinary, experimental, raw, and bold as it always was. We also said goodbye to loyal WORM veterans, but introduced new faces into our community. We welcomed increasing numbers of visitors, too. And, thanks to securing a more financially stable future, WORM will continue to be a platform and a stage for sharing stories and making art, making friends, and for embracing the unknown and bizarre.

Looking forward: WORM becomes The Ultimate Playground. WORM acknowledges that uncertainty is a constant reality, with social, cultural and political unrest increasingly part of all our lives. We see this uncertainty reflected in the artists we work with, the themes of our programmers, our ‘(inter)national / (g)local’ networks, and our visitors. We also know that people need social spaces. Creative citizens and artists will find a platform at WORM for independent self-expression. The Ultimate Playground will be a generous home for diverse voices.

The Ultimate Playground: a catalyst for new perspectives and forward-thinking plurality!

In this new phase we don’t look for a revolution, but for an evolution:

• towards a deeper and broader sense of what we make and do,
• towards stronger and more valuable connections with people,
• and towards a broadening and “anchoring” of our core values.

WORM’s artistic frame of references are threefold:

1. Culture of Play (humanity as essentially playful),
2. Pleasure Activism (setting optimism in motion),
3. Fertile Ground (a seedbed for innovation and genre development).

The Ultimate Playground kicks off with these events:

The Ultimate Playground ‘officially’ begins between Thursday the 23rd and Saturday the 25th of January We start with the publication launch of Playing Our Cards Right, by James Parnell (James expounds on how games can transform the cultural sector). Friday the 24th sees a performance night, Midnight At The Circus (where club culture meets circus artistry) and Saturday the 25th hosts a live 25 Hour Radio Relay, when WORM invites you to ‘Listen Weirder’ and train your listening as a skill.

Other January programme highlights

There is plenty to enjoy: The solo exhibition of Sam Jansen runs from the 10th to the 25th of January – see the WORM website for the exact dates. WORM hosts lots of raw, experimental and naïve music from the NL undergrounds throughout the month – 100% unfiltered, unfunded, un-fêted and unfettered! And our Filmlab will present the ongoing SPECTRAL project during IFFR from the 31st January, (keep an eye on the website).

WORM will plant the first seeds of The Ultimate Playground. We start with ‘what we don’t (yet) know’: we bring different ideas and disciplines together, look to train our listening as a skill, and experiment with ‘unconferencing’. 

We’ll keep on strengthening connections with existing festivals, partners and parties. We have plans for the WORM building to thrive and be more welcoming to all. And – yes, believe it or not – we will draw up plans for 2026, where we will focus more on the topics of sensuality and rurality. 

Other things

We want to buy Goodiepal’s great synthi! You can still support the Voordekunst crowdfunding campaign.

We begin a three-year project, MDT, for cultural volunteers under 30 years old, in which the tenets talent development, encountering, and helping others are central. And we continue a two-year development trajectory with Kay Slice on Diaspora Highlife, together with Paradiso, Melkweg, Productiehuis and House of Knowledge.

Watch out for… 

The Delta Listening summit, 10 Years of Cinema Colombiano, Instruments Make Play and Back to the Future festivals, LOCH x Het Bos x WORM (an international electronic music improv exchange).

WORM will continue to learn, grow stronger, and keep our finger on the pulse of society. We will remain self-critical, both regarding what we do and what others do in the cultural sector. Our mission is to maintain our distinctive and lively identity, and our strong, inspiring, and provocative position in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and the world.

On behalf of WORM, Charlien and Teun.