TOOLSHED

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. Their residency foregrounds listening as a mode of inquiry, resistance, and reimagination.

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.

As a residency initiative, TOOLSHED will host two collectives per year, each developing their projects over a four-month period. The program collaborates with Casa Chris, which offers residential studio apartments for TOOLSHED participants, supporting immersive research embedded within Rotterdam’s cultural landscape.