WORM x Amarte 2025 – Selected Projects

We’re excited to introduce the selected collectives from the WORM x Amarte 2025 Open Call!

An independent commission reviewed over 140 proposals, making the final selection was no easy task. We extend our heartfelt thanks to everyone who submitted their ideas.

Each of the chosen collectives will develop a workshop series exploring one or more of the following themes: Pleasure Activism, Deep Listening, The Nervous System, or Conflict Resolution.

We look forward to seeing these projects take shape and to welcoming participants as the collectives activate the themes in surprising and inspiring ways. 

The workshop series will take place in November and is free to attend.
Sign-ups will open in early October: stay tuned!

Read on and get to know the collectives & their projects.

Goblin Feast: Carla Menas, Chris Nelck, Mila Toneva and Paul Smullenberg.

Goblin Feast is a three-part workshop and a celebration of odd, mythical foods inspired by the goblin – those little, mischievous folklore outcasts. We imagine how these unruly creatures might celebrate a night of taunting humans: through food, fantasy, and ritual. Embracing the vague and the dirty, we let our imagination run wild, crafting dishes for a 1970s-inspired dinner party. And with food comes ritual. How do you serve your pudding? Do you pray? Do you kiss every aunt on the cheek at a Dutch birthday party? We invite you to feast, perform, and misbehave: just as the goblins would.

Notes from the commission: “Goblin Feast presented a stand-out “curve ball” among the proposals.The project is excellent in activating the participants in different ways. A new artistic group that is very exciting.” 

Wastewaves: Nina Blume, Cara Mayer, Robin Vandenbussche, Martijn van de Wiele, Lisa van Heyden

Wastewaves is an invitation to tune into the power relations, histories, and societal costs buried in the noise of waste. As waste is rebranded as a renewable energy source, deeper questions arise about those of us who breathe in its fumes and those who profit from it. Digging through the dirt of a multi-billion-euro industry, the workshop series centers around Rotterdam’s AVR waste-to-energy incinerator. Rooted in our shared interest in spatial research and field recording, Wastewaves uses sound as a method to make Rotterdam’s wastescapes audible. Across three sessions, participants build contact microphones, visit the incinerator, and make sonic sketches based on field recordings.

Notes from the commission: “Excellent proposal that clearly states what participants gain. It has a strong ecological and urgent mindset. Very well connected to the selected theme.”

Bolotsa Collective: Sonya, Egor, Sema, Tonya

Party Party is a playful political experiment by Bolotsa, an artist collective comprising four friends passionate about community organising. Through a series of three participatory workshops, Bolotsa will establish a fictitious political party inspired by the figure of the Child: free, unafraid of cringe, and full of rebellious curiosity. Party Party is an invitation to play politics differently – to connect, disrupt and reimagine what a political movement can be.

Notes from the commission: “Very well received by the jury; well thought out in its combination of urgency, playfulness and artistic vision. Inspired by art and activist projects that subvert traditional performance. It is very clear how this opportunity will support the development of the collective.”

SOUPSPOON Collective: Maoyi Qiu, Dakota Guo, Avita Maheen and Augustina Cai
SOUPSPOON Collective is a Rotterdam-based group of artists and cultural workers committed to cultivating a shared, Asian-contextualized space for particularities that elude translation. Formed in 2022, they foster a generative forum for “minor gestures” and “micro-politics,” working across workshops, performance, sound, text, and embodied research. SOFT TISSUE, is a workshop series that treats “health” as a metaphor for the shifting relations in body, environment and power dynamics. Moving between deep listening hypnosis of intergenerational memory, score-based collective “prescriptions,” and exchanges in compassionate touch, the series cultivates intimate spaces to explore vulnerability, solidarity, and collective transformation.

Notes from the commission: “The majority of the sent in proposals were dedicated to somatic work, SOUPSPOON’s proposal had the strongest artistic vision to support these ideas. ”