GOOD BYE 2024 | NEWSLETTER
Dear Sickhouse community,
Here comes the last newsletter of the year, to wish you all beautiful holidays and announce a few dates for 2025.
The team of Sickhouse is incredibly proud and thankful for all the support it receive this year while being without a fixed home! While we were struggling to make space for our alternative ways of doing art, Sickhouse community, local partners and international playful friends made sure we could present, exchange, produce and that meant everything.
* We also especially want to thank our volunteers that followed us in the multiple location we hosted our program, that stayed enthusiastic and helpful, adapting all the time and making these places home for the community! THANK YOU! *
In this newsletter,
- Look back on 2024, RADICAL JOY RESISTANCE
- New year borrel
- SickProd 2025
- Dreams on a Pillow crowdfunding
- Important dates for 2025
We wish you all beautiful celebration days, may you be with love ones and playful ones!
In 2024, with the theme RADICAL JOY RESISTANCE Sickhouse has been looking into the role of playfulness in movements of resistance.
In May, the exhibition Ctrl.Bending presented artists playing around with their hardware, questioning control, purposes and material. With Bearwarp - Silvia Binda Heiserova - Emilie Breslavetz - Leon Denise - Dorian Rigal - Vincent Schoutsen - Wouter van Veldhoven - Tijmen Zonnevijlle
Over the summer we invited artists to host LARP sessions A Shimmer in the Dark and a Weather report to engage in complex situations while taking on new roles. Designed by Sophie Allerding and Jana Romanova.
In September the interactive and performative installation Wishing Well, invited visitors and the local queer community to explore what their collective voice could express. Presented by SasaHara in collaboration with Alex Olloman and Nathan Marcus.
In October, the immersive exhibition of Joystick invited players to get lost and navigate, float, swim or dive in between all directions. Installation from Madison Bycroft.
Through this program we asked ourselves what or whom we are resisting and how we are integrating resistance in our lives, what spaces do we take, what shapes can it take… It brought us to places of weakness, intimacy, awkwardness, sadness, where play could almost always find room.
Empowered by this research we wanted The Overkill to be a moment to bring people together, a moment to rethink our way to take space, an event allowing planned but also spontaneous gathering to arise… The program has been set-up to showcase diverse testimony of resistance while giving the visitors tools to share their own stories.
From the performance with LAS TESIS to the March of resistance, the opening has been an incredible moment to recognise the power of play and the strength of this community.
Poetry is an important aspect that connected many moments of the festival, letting chosen words, random associations, foreign sentences give a certain lightness to our acts of resistance.
Addressing the role and the responsibilities of the game industry and art world in the violent context the society finds itself in, was also an important objective for our organisation. And the festival has been a way to step up and stand stronger.
! WELCOMING 2025 !
Looking forward to start 2025 and plan the great move to our new location, we are happy, proud and thankful to share that Sickhouse will be supported by the Gemeente Enschede for the 4 years to come and by Stimulerings Fonds for 2025 and 2026!
"De zeggingskracht en oorspronkelijkheid van het programma worden door de commissie hoog gewaardeerd. Het spreekt veel energie uit het voorstel. Het programma wordt door de commissie als voorbeeldstellend gezien voor de manier waarop de nieuwste generatie makers op een vanzelfsprekende manier eclectische programma’s samenstelt."
(EN translation)
"The committee highly values the expressiveness and originality of the programme. It expresses a lot of energy in the proposal. The committee sees the programme as an example of the way in which the latest generation of makers naturally composes eclectic programmes."
quote from the Stimuleringsfonds committee review.
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SAVE THE DATES FOR 2025!
Deadline SickProd application : 10 January 2025
Global Game Jam : 24 to 26 January 2025
Sickhouse 7th anniversary : 28 February 2025
Ultimate Indie Mash : 24 May 2025 (application will open at the end of January)
Film Camp : 14 to 28 July 2025
Re-opening Sickhouse new location : September 2025
KO(O)RTS : 26 & 27 September 2025, with Concordia and Theater makerij
The Overkill festival : 20 to 23 November 2025
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