Space for Education and Participation

A New Space for Education & Participation

We are proud to announce the brand-new Education & Participation Space at Kunstinstituut Melly: a vibrant and flexible environment dedicated to learning, meeting, creativity, and community exchange. Situated on the ground floor of our building, this space is designed as a visible and active pillar of our institution, ensuring that education, knowledge sharing, and collective learning remain central to our mission. Whether you’re a child, student, artist, educator, or visitor, this is a space for curiosity, care, and connection.

Holiday Passport 2026 - Doing as Drawing

Join us this summer at Kunstinstituut Melly and discover the many possibilities of thinking through drawing. From 18 July to 30 August, children aged 4 to 12 can take part, free of charge, alongside their parents or carers, in an adventurous art programme full of play, imagination and discovery.

Free Saturday Workshops & Collective Learning

Since the opening of our Education & Participation Space, Kunstinstituut Melly has become a lively setting for workshops, talks, and collective learning. Artists, educators, and participants of all ages and backgrounds come together to explore creativity as a shared, evolving practice.

Our Saturday workshops provide a space for experimentation and connection. In January 2026, during Nurdan Ariöz’s workshops, participants engaged with storytelling, visual arts, color, drawing, writing, and movement, contributing to a collective story archive: a living artwork that preserves each person’s presence and voice. In February 2026, during Sabrina Schoop’s workshops in Poetic Diaspora, participants explore language, words, and personal memories, creating poetic fragments that weave together identity, memory, and multilingual expression. In March 2026, the workshop series Tip of the Tongue, led by Veronika Babayan, explores multilingualism, migration, and memory through dried fruit. Participants create fruit chains inspired by expressions from different languages, reflecting on care, loss, humour, and change. Language becomes something you can see, touch, and assemble. Come experience a language that cannot be expressed in words! Nurdan Ariöz led the free Saturday workshops in April 2026. What You Haven’t Said Yet was an open spoken word workshop in which personal stories were made visible through image, text, and voice. The workshop series consisted of three sessions that could be followed independently, in which participants explored different ways of writing: from collage, from a personal object, and through an ode to an unseen talent. During the Saturday workshops in June, led by Thijmen Burgerhout, participants create race numbers, banners, medals and trophies that celebrate non-performance – something of great value, particularly in today’s results-oriented society, where speed, productivity and visibility take centre stage. In a playful, sporty setting, the pressure to perform is turned on its head, creating space for doubt, calm and the rediscovery of one’s own worth and meaning. In July, Conform Cox will host a series of three free Saturday workshops where we’ll draw, imagine, and rethink the world around us, taking inspiration from the exhibition Draw Withdraw Redraw. Each workshop explores a question related to improving our everyday lives. In the first workshop, we’ll reimagine the human form; in the second, we’ll rethink our own living spaces; and in the third, we’ll turn our attention to Rotterdam. The workshops are part of Holiday Passport 2026 – Doing as Drawing. The second Free Saturday Workshop series of Holiday Passport 2026 – Doing as Drawing – will be hosted by Carmen José this August. In Emotional Trees in a Collective Forest, we will explore drawing beyond the academic canons of control and violence over the course of two Saturdays. Together, we will create a vibrant forest on large textiles, culminating in a collective installation hanging from the ceiling. The final free Saturday workshops as part of Holiday Passport 2026 – Doing as Drawing will be led by Elina Charinti. Cultivating Acts of Courage is a series that explores courage as a way to move forward, to refuse to conform and to find new paths. Using felt, drawings and natural materials, participants reflect on memories, values and communities, and create tangible objects that embody courage, resilience, care and hope. Courage becomes something that can be made, seen and touched!

CLiP #7: The Garage School of Prepping Otherwise

Collective Learning in Practice (CLiP) is the successor to Kunstinstituut Melly’s successful Work-Learn Project (2018) and has run six editions to date. CLiP gives participants the opportunity to study contemporary art issues and work with our team to make the institution more publicly accessible. Each edition supports 10–14 young participants with the tools, skills, and inspiration to grow as individuals, decision-makers, and professionals through a six-month study period. This year, CLiP returns with its seventh edition: The Garage School of Prepping Otherwise. Over six months (October 2025 – March 2026), a group of Rotterdam-based participants aged 17–24 is exploring what it means to survive together in times of global crises, militarisation, and social inequity.