7–12
September
2025

Grafische Werkplaats Amsterdam



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Salvage, translated to ‘bergen’ in Dutch, denotes a discovery of hidden value in something dredged up from the deep, something thought to be beyond repair. As a design act, it’s a transformation, a kind of alchemy, wherein new life is breathed into abandoned things. How, then, might salvage provide an ethos and an imaginary for our futures? Can we envision the salvage of cities, of democracy, of our relations with the natural world? The port city of Amsterdam provides a perfect venue for the topic of salvage, with its history as a term used in shipping insurance, and the city’s possible futures below sea level. Aside from transforming shipping palettes into furniture or abandoned buildings into communal residences, salvage also becomes a political theory, a “craft of the poor” and a way of making that activates a protesting public. Practitioners of salvage “open themselves to the new and unseen,” according to political theorist Jason Kosnoski, who sees salvage as one of the “arts of living on a damaged planet,” in the words of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. 

Inquiries are immersive, experimental, and unconventional gatherings that invite detours and allow space to challenge assumptions, expand boundaries, and emerge with fresh insights. We invite participants with a convivial attitude, healthy appetite, developing research and a willingness to embrace elastic experiences and reframe the structure. We seek the curious, the playful, the awkward, the profound to get inspired, distracted, diverted, lost, found, and renewed at the intersection of our collective research.

Further reading/ watching

Kosnoski, J. 2022. The Political Theory of Salvage. Suny Press 

Ministry of Information. 1943.  ‘Salvage Saves Shipping.’ 

Stavrides, S. 2016. Common Space: The City as Commons. Zed Books. 

Tsing, A.L. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of LIfe in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton UP. 

Williams, E.C.  2015. Salvage. Journal of American Studies 49 (4)





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