Mensen Zeggen Dingen (People Say Things) is a Dutch collective. Things are meaningless if they’re not given words. That’s exactly what these people do. Expressing things, making them discussable, placing exclamation marks or question marks after them with their club show.

Sabina Lukovic is a critical sociologist, poet, lecturer and programme maker. Above all, she is angry. As a host and programme maker for Mensen Zeggen Dingen, she has performed on stages across the country, from Lowlands to Into The Great Wide Open. Her work focuses on inequality, power and activism, using poetry as a means to make social issues tangible and open to discussion. She writes raw and personal pieces on mental health, resilience and social justice. In her classes and performances, she constantly seeks a balance between connection and confrontation. All with one goal: to shape a world that is sustained not by violence, but by justice.

Asmae Amaddaou is a North African poet, playwright and screenwriter, spoken word artist, avid bookworm and lover of the world. She is currently studying Writing for Performance at the Utrecht School of the Arts. Language is her great love and passion in life. She sees it as her personal mission to ensure better representation of Muslims, people of colour and women in the (Dutch) art world. In the summer of 2022, she took part in the Woord900 Project, a collaboration between ILFU & Mooie Woorden. She dreams of a world in which she can keep writing forever, and in which Morocco wins the World Cup.

Live out your daydreams with Tyler Koudijzer. A Rotterdam native, spoken word artist and co-founder of the spoken word collective Barguijs. His words can be heard at festivals, in theatres, at music venues, in secondary schools, at universities, and in local government institutions. Tyler is more than happy to create bespoke spoken word pieces, poetic summaries, voice-overs and workshops where language and spoken word take centre stage. In his spoken word pieces, Tyler interweaves diaspora, colonialism and intertwined histories. He works from the Javanese concept of Gotong Royong: living together; sharing the burden. By always keeping this in mind, he ensures that what he creates, does and says is always for others.