Under The Table – Karina Puuffin

Under the Table is a participatory installation and performance inspired by Puuffin’s childhood memory of hiding under the table in her Ukrainian home and drawing on the wallpaper. The work features a whimsical wooden house with a single wallpapered wall, imitating a living room, where visitors are invited to draw or write memories of their childhood homes. Each day, four singers perform a short choral piece composed from these contributions, turning personal memories into a living, evolving symphony. The project transforms a private, nostalgic moment into a shared act of creativity and remembrance, exploring themes of belonging, displacement, and resilience.

(يالله تنام) Yalla Tnam – Rebecca Lillich // Krüger & Ahmad Mallah

Yalla Tnam (يالله تنام) is a ritual performance — a composed echo of grief, protest, and survival. Through voice, sound, and movement, artists Ahmad Mallah and Rebecca Lillich // Krüger invite the audience to witness an act of collective mourning and rebirth. The performance interweaves Fairuz’s lullaby “Yalla Tnam” with Syrian grief rituals that emerged during the early years of the Syrian Revolution— Mallah’s singing, processed live through a vocal processor, becomes a haunting rhythm of care and endurance. Lillich // Krüger responds with embodied gestures of care + violence, crafting a mythic performance that evokes both tenderness and tension.

Yalla Tnam unfolds as a ceremony — a poetic moment suspended between the personal and the political. It explores the artists intertwined heritages, migration histories, and their complex relationship to the Netherlands, a place of both refuge and displacement.

Dear All, – Shino Matsuura

Dear All, is a moving, site-specific installation shaped by contributions from over 120 artists and non-artists from across Europe, Japan, and the US. Each presentation invites new participants to expand the project, integrating works that capture personal, historical, and social impressions of people who have crossed my path. Previously shown in Ghent, Kanazawa, and New York, the installation adapts and evolves with every location.

I ask those I meet: strangers, coworkers, friends, lovers, to fill a cassette case with memories, artworks, files, or gestures. Returned cases join the growing collection, which I promise to exhibit across countries throughout my life as an ode to connection. In the Rotterdam edition, Dear All, will reflect in nuanced ways both my in-between identity and the experiences of multiple people growing up in this city. Visitors are invited to sit and form their own relationships through interpretation, reflection, and participation onsite or via livestream.

The Sea Studio – Roger Anis

The Sea Studio is a mobile participatory art project that invites people to reconnect with the sea, through stories, memories, and portraits. Moving across different festival locations on a bakfiet (cargo bike), I will set up a mobile photography studio with a printed backdrop of the sea that I can move with and build in different locations of the festival. Participants are invited to step into the scene, pose, have a small talk and share their personal reflections, songs, and emotions connected to the sea. Each participant will be photographer and each printed photo becomes part of a growing mosaic on another backdrop that unfolds throughout the festival, forming a collective portrait of our shared relationship with water.

A Heard Space: All That Lives – Yu Zhang

What if you could hear only living beings in Rotterdam? What if you could explore an auditory space that is personal and intimate, yet connects with all that lives here? This work listens to the city’s living presence. You hear brief human traces: hums, breaths, laughter, calls, and more-then-human voices: birds along the river, insects in parks, tiny vibrations from leaves and branches. This works takes away all noise such as traffic, alarms, wind, and rain so the life in Rotterdam can be heard.

In the room, up to five people wear listening devices and explore together while each person hears a personal mix. When you walk, turn, or lean, nearby sounds come forward and distant ones fade. A wall map shows real-time trails of where listeners are and how they pause, so passersby can see the shared attention and join. This work brings a quiet pause inside the festival, and echoes “Fugitive Roots”: staying connected while moving, relation made audible, unfixed, and alive. Slow down. Listen together. Notice more.

New Moon (Gods of Saint Domingue, In Search of The Empathic Warrior) – Raziel Perin

New Moon (In Search of The Empathic Warrior) is an immersive performance where I embody a Griot — a Caribbean fire keeper and matrilineal storyteller who weaves voices across distance and time. Through soundscape, poetry, and movement, I present Rotterdam through my eyes and through the stories of those connected to me, transforming the city into a living myth. Rooted in my Dominican experience and upcoming research on griot traditions in Senegal, the work invites the audience into a sensorial field where drawings, chants, and field recordings converge. Costumed by queer designer Papa Oyeyemi, I guide visitors through a collective act of listening and myth-making. In the short term, the project manifests as a synthesis of my journey and a grounding in the present moment — activating shared creation, imagination, and care and connecting diverse audiences to the multiplicity of diasporic experience and its strategies of survival.

Between Our steps – Can Bora

We are always asked to move toward the future, so we walk forward, together. Sometimes in the dark, sensing a stranger beside us. Take it as a silent dance in the dark. Between Our Steps is a poetic fusion of video and participatory performance, a collective choreography through simple acts of walking, sensing, and sharing. Participants carry objects — a candle, toy, or branch — and walk in silence. Some no touch, some hold hands, exchange objects, or leave them behind.

Like plant roots, we expand in all directions — meeting, parting, and continuing to walk, experiencing togetherness, even briefly. For a moment, we form a decentralized network of bodies, a collective intelligence in motion, with no leader but continuous flow. Come, even if hesitant. We will find a way.

Cantes de ida (Heenreis liedjes / One-way songs) – Guillermo Martín Viana

Where do we belong to if we are constructing our own identity? What are the songs, gestures, and stories we carry with us when we are elsewhere? What if home is not a place, but a practice of care in motion? Which new roots can hold us as we move?

Cantes de ida stems from community art as healing practice, and unfolds as a living, breathing encounter between people, memory, sound and movement. It begins as a nomadic, participatory installation — a shelter in motion — where people are invited to share fragments of their own lived experiences regarding migration, fugitivity and being elsewhere. These contributions, translated into embodied gestures and sounds, become the seed for interdisciplinary improv-based performances combining drums, voice, dance and pre-recorded media; a scenic piece that, like micelium, weaves together and nourishes our different roots — a collective act of remembering, listening, and belonging.

Seeking Refuge with a Purple Flower – Pırıltı Onukar

Seeking Refuge with a Purple Flower is a participatory tea ritual that invites you to slow down and come together in the middle of the festival. Around a small table surrounded by the purple glow of a cozy tent and ambient music, we will prepare and share tea made from karabaş—a wild lavender from my family’s mountain village in Western Anatolia. Karabaş is now a fugitive as it’s natural habitat is currently being destroyed, yet it invites us to root.

As we watch its bright blue color bleed into the water, stories of migration, home, and care unfold. The flower becomes a bridge—connecting us, memories, and places through its fragrance, color, and warmth. This gentle, collective experience offers a moment of togetherness and reflection amid the city’s movement. It’s an invitation to belong, to share, and to celebrate the small acts of connection that make community possible.

Oh yeah! I have an accent! – Mengze Li

The body, sounds, roles, audience, and space will all come alive during the performance Oh yeah! I have an accent!. It transforms the accent into a living, sensory experience—a word that carries our identity and history yet is often hidden away.

The performance unfolds as a “social gathering”—an artificial space that reveals traces of nature. The soundscape grows from a question: “How can I help you?”—voices are cut, spliced, distorted, stretched, and layered. The story emerges through a multi-role body—repeating gestures, pouring itself out, crying, exposing vulnerability in chaos. Here, I invite people to see, hear, and feel the existence of accents, together building this shared “world” of accents.

Rooting in Progress – Victoria de la Torre

Roots are sturdy structures running deep in the ground, back in time obscure, solid anchors. Light, fragile, porous bonds, new connections. Roots are what we are familiar with, our sense of belonging, our identity. But growing rotten, roots can also stagnate, suffocating us. A continuous cycle of construction and destruction: rooting in new places, uprooting from existing values, re-rooting as resilience.

Rooting in progress is an artistic research process that explores the cycle of rooting, uprooting and re-rooting, and the tensions and emotions we experience within it. The outcome will be an interactive installation where participants will be invited to touch, sense and play with sculptural objects made of common repurposed materials (wood, fabric, clay, rope) echoing the three stages of the cycle.

Dear – Madelief Lammers

The future, the poetry, your mom, the earth, a friendly stranger – to whom would you like to write a letter? Dear is an exploration of writing as an act of collectivity; through a one-on-one five minute encounter, we write micro-poetry in a letter to someone or something. The writing happens between us: two pencils on one piece of paper. Taking turns, writing one word each, there appears a text that none of us could think of by ourselves.

Dear questions our current frameworks of authorship, ownership and writing as an act of solitude, and instead weaves bits and pieces of our personal imaginations together into a collective work. Madelief Lammers is an artist in text, sound and space. Her projects explore and invite for listening and close attention, looking for ways to imagine and reimagine reality.

Rotterdam Rhizome – Niki Scheijen

Imagine Rotterdam’s music and art scene as a living organism, pulsing with light. Rotterdam Rhizome is an interactive LED sculpture that transforms MOMO Festival into a glowing network that connects all venues through sound. When a band starts playing on the other side of the city, light flows through the organic installation. Throughout the weekend, these moments accumulate, building a visual memory of our collective energy. Like roots spreading underground, Rotterdam’s cultural scene grows through connections between artists, venues, and communities. This installation makes those invisible networks visible. As you move between MOMO venues, you’ll see how all these individual venues contributes to something larger: a city-wide web of creativity that keeps growing and adapting.

It’s Never “Just Hair” – Avantika Tibrewala

Meet the Chudail — the femme fatale they warned you about. Too, too much. Her hair flows wild over the boxes our society stands on — neat, polished confines of obedience. A Collective farewell to the decaying ideologies that taught us to discipline ourselves with combs and braid away our natural ferocity. She’s cutting through them all. Bye-Bye.

A love letter to rage and reclamation, to women who’s hair refuses to behave. This Chudail isn’t hiding. She’s spinning and laughing over the ruins of what doesn’t serve anymore. Her Mumma’s question — “What did you do to your hair?” — passed down like an heirloom, lives in every strand she refuses to tame. Colonial hangovers? Snipped. Patriarchal combs? Snapped. Monstrous or divine? You decide — but whatever you do, vote for her before she haunts your dreams.

To My Celestial – Quan Nguyen

To My Celestial is a multimedia installation that reimagines Vietnamese ancestor worship in a new, digital form. Mixing handmade paper altars with video projections and sound, To My Celestial questions the spiritual practices if they are mediated by cameras, software, and media. The work addresses the fascination and the dissonance of rituals when placed in technological space, reflects the coexistence of tradition and modernity in a society that is characterized by speed and ‍‌‍‍‌‍‌‍‍‌change.