MOMO x Amarte Open Call 2025

Henry Flowers – Mateusz Godlewski & Omer Van Soldt

Everybody wants Henry Flowers to cut off his fingers. 

Henry is very against this idea. He’s fond of his hands the way they are. He needs them for important things… Like sculpting. 

His father thinks the fingers are a distraction. It’s better to get rid of them. They’re good for nothing. 

It’s time Henry becomes a proper citizen and stops twiddling his thumbs.

Henry Flowers is a play by Light/Light Collective. 

It follows a sculptor who replaces traditional religious dogmas with a faith in artistry. As Henry tries to capture the sacred beauty he once saw in religious paintings, he realises his relationship with art starts to mirror his former faith.

About the Artist: Omer van Soldt (1996) is an artist born in the Netherlands. He works mainly in the performance and installation arts, finding ways to turn the attention from the object to the audience. Through the (visual) language he uses in his art he invites the audience to engage with themselves in scenarios he creates. Coming mainly from the Fine Arts field Omer recently is making his debut on the stage writing pieces for theater, circus and performing arts. Omer is studying his Bachelors at the Artscience Interfaculty both at the Royal Academy of Art as well as the Royal Conservatory in the Hague.

Mateusz Godlewski (2001) is a Polish artist, composer, and instrument inventor based in The Hague, where he is currently studying at the Royal Conservatory. His work focuses on exploring contrasts, uncovering humor and symbolism in pure sound and imagery, and challenging the attention spans of his audience. His approach blurs the boundaries between performance, installation, and concert, integrating his self-built instruments into diverse settings. By incorporating theater and performance as essential elements of his music, he creates immersive, multidisciplinary experiences.

Playful Dreamscape – Alexandra Subota

Playful Dreamscape is an interactive installation inviting visitors to engage in play and recreation.

Incorporating sensory play, the installation consists of soft swings and atmospheric effects like fog, colourful lighting and the playful presence of soap bubble.

Playful Dreamscape is a response to the growing sense of fear, loneliness, and disillusionment in the face of global challenges. In these trying times, engaging in childlike wonder becomes a powerful tool for coping. The exaggerated softness, dazzling colours, and surreal atmosphere stand in contrast to the greyness of urban, everyday life, nurturing mental health and personal freedom through play and imagination.

About the Artist: Fascinated by the absurdity of daily life, Alexandra Subota creates bittersweet sculptures and installations characterized by strong colours, soft materials, fluff, glitter and shiny surfaces. By using hyper-saturated imagery from digital aesthetics and childhood memories, she captures the contrasts between desire and disappointment, cuteness and toughness.

Cross Roads – Laura Eager & Rosa Gooij

Cross Roads is a documented performance in a taxi ride, revealing the encounters that take place between a real taxi driver, a passenger and a spectator. In a semi-fictional narrative, visual artist Laura Eager is learning to become a taxi driver, with theatre maker Rosa Gooij directing the act. Using film, audio and performance they investigate the public and private entries of a taxi,  and the encounters happening between drivers and passengers. What is shared at this moment, how do they perceive or interact with one another, and what effect does this have on how they view the current world around them? 

During The MOMO Festival the public are invited to book a 20 minute time slot to experience the performance as a passenger in the car. A constant dialogue of observation and intervention is created through a live stream of the work into a video installation close by.

About the Artist: Laura Eager is a Visual Artist and performer originally from South East England and currently based in Amsterdam, where she graduated from the Audio visual department of the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in 2023.  Laura’s artistic practice uses performative scenarios, films and audio works, to research the relationship between the spectator, director and performer at the intersection between real life and ‘stage’, fusing public spaces with white cubes, or black boxes. Her projects evolve through the staged encounters and performative happenings that she places herself and others in, to explore the borders of what is public and private, reality and fiction, and uncover the perceptions of the everyday.

Rosa Gooij is an Amsterdam born and raised theatre maker, performer and teacher. In 2023 she graduated from the bachelor theatre teacher at the Amsterdam University of the Arts. Her work can be found in the city streets, landscapes, festivals and night culture. Her collective ‘Digidiheu’ brings freaky magical performances, infiltrates the mostly festive crowd with playful interactive puppetry rituals and stories. With ‘groep Horizon’ she combines installation art with location theatre, inhabiting landscapes and building focused experiences for their audiences She is also part of ‘De Slapelozen’ an Amsterdam based theatre group, working in community centres, retirement homes, and pop ups in street life.

Beneath the shimmering it’s dark blue – Vera Kersting 

‘Beneath the shimmering it’s dark blue’ explores through painting, prints and documentary footage how structural violence during the Cold War have influenced (inner) worlds. These different media come together in an installative work. On the outside of the installation hang two painted banners inspired by a study of (Western) imperialist propaganda images from the Cold War until now and the visual language of several anti-colonial counter-movements. Inside the installation, a video is shown that hovers between dreamlike abstraction and documentary. The installation shows the subjective and fragmented nature of history, rather than a clear linear narrative. The focus is not on listing historical facts, but on questioning dominant narratives and how this has shaped people’s imaginations, dreams, emotions and inner perceptions. Moving on the border between past – present, subjective – objective, personal – societal, this project poetically explores contemporary society with a focus on inner experiences haunted by a violent past.

About the Artist: Vera Kersting (1997) is a Rotterdam-based artist engaged in crossovers between painting and other mediums, such as film and writing. She paints images that explore relational dynamics between media images, digitally & physical landscapes and the fiction of reality. Boundaries play a significant role: visually on the canvas or more ambiguous boundaries between public—private, subject—object, past—present. This crossing of borders facilitates transgression in which fetishism, spectacle and madness emerge. Vera’s work is charged with unsettling emotions of conflict, pervasive in society – yet often unsurfaced. The paintings are composites of multiple suffused layers. The subject matter, often derived from media, declines straightforward interpretation and is filled with innuendos and double entendres. These dissonances created within the work can universally be understood but are strangely connected to the artist’s own identity.

Phantom Limb – Amos Peled 

Phantom Limb (2023) is a project exploring the enigmatic and poetic relationship between a human being and the black box that is their interior through the use of a medical ultrasound machine. Amos Peled has been developing methods to perform audio-visual manipulations which transform the ultrasound machine into an instrument that illuminates the inside of the body and expands the space of the artistic act into the organs, under the skin. The work investigates conceptions such as the distance of the human body from the idea of oneself, the hierarchical relationship between the inside and the outside, pain as a poetic message, and the lack of internal symmetry.

About the Artist: I am a multidisciplinary artist, currently using experimental music and technologies, audio-visual installations, and performance art to look at medical technology and medical processes from different perspectives. I transform an ultrasound machine, for example, into an instrument that illuminates the inside of the body and expands the space of the artistic act into the organs, under the skin. Having spent many of my younger years in hospitals, wired to a myriad of medical devices, strung up in doctors’ opinions, the shift in perspective from patient to artist is at the heart of my creative practice.

at the end of the sentence, it rotted – Cecilie Fang Jensen

When language includes and excludes depending on who does and who does not speak, ‘at the end of the sentence, it rotted’ is a transforming sound installation that reflects upon the diasporic conditions of language.

Looking upon a history of constructed languages, the installation consists of abstractions of writing systems that together with a live soundscape are constantly transformed and turned into decay, as water is pumped in and reversed after 8 hours.

As an outsider of a language, any written or spoken words are purely strokes andphonetics; an asemic relation, when you are unable to grasp the meaning of words. Through bio-asemic rust and decay, ‘at the end of the sentence, it rotted’ searches for a language that includes all. It’s a return to a time of pre-linguistics, where sound andtouch are prominent. To return to a time before words became the dominant way of communicating.

About the Artist: Cecilie Fang is an anti-disciplinary artist and writer from China and Denmark currently based in The Hague. Her work is a continuous auto-ethnographic research, in which she researches power structures through and with language. She is interested in the diasporic conditions of language and what power lies behind literacy and the inability to speak. Through micro performances of materials and their organic processes, she meditates on alternative ways of languaging (looking upon meaning production as not fixed, but open-ended and process-oriented) and aims to create work exploring speculative linguistic ecosystems.