TOOLSHED #1 : Pungwe Listening

TOOLSHED is Kunstinstituut Melly’s new residency and research initiative dedicated to exploring the tools we use to build, question, and transform cultural institutions today.

Located on the second floor of Melly, TOOLSHED is a dynamic experimental space for reflection, discussion, experimentation, and action. Building on our programs: Tools for Collective Learning, Tools for Demodernizing, and Tools for Conviviality, TOOLSHED extends our commitment to institutional practices rooted in accessibility, criticality, and care.

At TOOLSHED, tooling is approached as both a practical and symbolic process. It invites artists, cultural practitioners, researchers, and collectives to engage with artistic, theoretical, and material tools that shape how we institute. TOOLSHED is a space to reflect on and challenge conventional institutional frameworks, while exploring interdisciplinary practices that expand the potential of art spaces to engage meaningfully with their surroundings.

For its pilot edition, TOOLSHED welcomes Listening at Pungwe, the collective comprising artist and historian Memory Biwa and music and sound researcher Robert Machiri. Working between Windhoek, Berlin, and Johannesburg, Listening at Pungwe engages with historical and contemporary sound collections and archives to create spaces where people can hear, feel, and activate new knowledge systems that challenge dominant ways of interacting with the world.

Over the course of five months, Memory and Robert approach the TOOLSHED space as a site to cut, play, rewind, splice and dice different materials, whether they were books, sounds or photographs. While the collective slowly reworked these fragments, they also built a radio studio and a record library, enabling them to host The Pungwe Listening Rotations. These open radio sessions draw from the call-and-response tactics of the pungwe: a term used in Zimbabwe to describe all-night social gatherings. Founded in 2017, Listening at Pungwe began as a jam session of ideas centred on sonic memories and the archives of southern African histories. The Rotterdam radio rotations extend this lineage, offering listening as a way of accessing alternative archives: living, communal, and spiritual, beyond material taxonomy.

The residency culminates with a public jam session: a cypher of text cuts, imaginaries, sounds, dance, and other methodologies of living, anchored in Katherine McKittrick’s text Dear Science and Other Stories, and developed in collaboration with Lynnée Denise and Eiliyas.

TOOLSHED is designed as an open, publicly accessible space. Visitors are invited to engage directly with the processes and research unfolding within TOOLSHED, witnessing and participating in new modes of collective learning, institutional questioning, and artistic experimentation.

After the end of Listening at Pungwe’s residency, TOOLSHED remains open to the general public. Visitors were invited to listen to a recording by Princess Constance Magogo, activate the sonic sensors placed on the plants that had lived and breathed alongside the collective and their collaborators for the duration of the program, and browse through a curated selection of LPs. Photographic fragments cut and sequenced by Memory Biwa and drawings on wood by Robert Machiri, also referred to as markings, punctuated the walls.

As a residency initiative, TOOLSHED hosts two collectives per year, each developing their projects over a four-month period. For residents based outside the Netherlands, the program collaborates with Casa Chris, which offers residential studio apartments, supporting immersive research embedded within Rotterdam’s cultural landscape.