TOOLSHED #2 : The Imaginary Stage

Act III
Dear Puppet, sorry to burden you with existence. PS. Please speak for me.

Act III of The Imaginary Stage is a collaborative project by Andrea Celeste La Forgia and Kerem Akar, developed within the TOOLSHED residency at Kunstinstituut Melly. The project understands The Imaginary Stage as the capacity to imagine otherwise: not as fantasy or escape, but as a shared social practice through which new characters, relationships, ideas, and possibilities can be rehearsed collectively through play and experimentation.

Over the course of several months, the artists worked with participants from neighbourhood centres across Rotterdam to explore creativity in relation to labour, migration, social class, collective learning, and making. Through workshops, participants created puppets and developed their characters intuitively through conversation, improvisation, storytelling, and theatre exercises. The puppets became agents of imagination and collective inquiry, redistributing voice and agency while creating space for participants to explore personal and collective stories, memories, desires, and impossible ideas through the voice of another.

The puppets presented in this exhibition were made in collaboration with participants from Dokhuis, Gemaal op Zuid, Het Wijkpaleis, and SOL (Samen Ondernemend Leren). Rather than remaining in the places where they were created, the puppets travelled between neighbourhood centres, becoming vessels for stories, encounters, and the traces of new relationships. This presentation reconnects those journeys and offers a glimpse into the conversations, exchanges, and collective processes that shaped the project.

The Imaginary Stage is part of TOOLSHED, a residency and research initiative at Kunstinstituut Melly. This edition is supported by Amarte Fonds and developed in collaboration with Dokhuis, Het Wijkpaleis, Gemaal op Zuid, SOL (Samen Ondernemend Leren), and Singing Club Rotterdam (Tara Reece).

Exhibition Locations

The puppets created through The Imaginary Stage are presented across five locations in Rotterdam.

Kunstinstituut Melly

20 June – 31 July 2026

Dokhuis

23 June – 25 July 2026

Gemaal op Zuid

23 June – 30 August 2026

Het Wijkpaleis

23 June – 30 August 2026

SOL 't Steiger

23 June – 30 August 2026

TOOLSHED

TOOLSHED is a residency and research initiative by Kunstinstituut Melly that explores the tools we use today to build, question, and transform cultural institutions. The programme invites artists, cultural practitioners, researchers, and collectives to critically reflect on conventional institutional frameworks while developing interdisciplinary practices that expand the capacity of art spaces to engage meaningfully with their surroundings.

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. For its pilot edition, TOOLSHED welcomed Listening at Pungwe, the collective comprising artist and historian Memory Biwa and music and sound researcher Robert Machiri.

For its second edition, TOOLSHED welcomes artists Andrea Celeste La Forgia and Kerem Akar, whose joint residency focuses on the relationship between labour, social class, migration, and collective forms of learning and making. Working from distinct yet complementary practices, they approach art and performance as tools to question existing structures and to explore alternative ways of gathering, sharing knowledge, and imagining together.

During their TOOLSHED residency, Andrea Celeste La Forgia and Kerem Akar explore how artistic and pedagogical practices can function as tools for emancipation, solidarity, and institutional imagination. Through performance, collaboration, and research, they develop situations in which labour, knowledge, and creativity are collectively rethought and activated.

Public Performance: Dear Puppet, sorry to burden you with existence. PS. Please speak for me.

On Saturday 20 June, artists and theatre makers Andrea Celeste La Forgia and Kerem Akar invite you to the Public Performance: Dear Puppet, sorry to burden you with existence. PS. Please speak for me. at Kunstinstituut Melly. The performance marks the opening of Act III of their residency project TOOLSHED #2: The Imaginary Stage.

Call for Puppeteers: Join the Puppet Choir!

Artists and theatre makers Andrea Celeste La Forgia and Kerem Akar invite you to join the Puppet Choir at Kunstinstituut Melly, part of the final phase of their residency project TOOLSHED #2: The Imaginary Stage. Over the past months, workshops across Rotterdam have brought a growing community of strange, tender, chaotic, and impossible puppets into being. Now, these travelling characters gather at Kunstinstituut Melly alongside their makers, puppeteers, friends, neighbours, and fellow performers for a collective rehearsal. Led by Tara Reece from the Singing Club Rotterdam, the Puppet Choir temporarily transforms Melly into a shared stage for collective play, rehearsal, and imagination.

Collective Puppetry-Making Workshop

Join artists and theatre makers Andrea Celeste La Forgia and Kerem Akar for a two-session workshop exploring puppetry, storytelling, and collective creation. Using plaster, fabric, and found materials, participants will design and build their own puppets, then bring them to life through simple theatre exercises involving voice, movement, and character development.

Meet the TOOLSHED residents

Andrea Celeste La Forgia

Andrea Celeste La Forgia is an artist based in Rotterdam whose work moves across archival research, painting, prop making, and theatrical performance. Her practice interweaves family experience with broader histories of class struggle and labour, examining how social class is lived, embodied, and reproduced through contemporary forms of work. Central to her practice is an ongoing collaboration with her mother, a lifelong factory worker in Italy, through which lived working class knowledge, tools, and imagination become artistic methods and critical frameworks.

Kerem Akar

Kerem Akar is an artist, theatre maker, educator, and DJ based in Amsterdam. His practice emerges from everyday diasporic migration experiences and is grounded in questioning existing norms. Through collective making processes, often working with children, young people, and non professional performers, he dismantles traditional hierarchies within theatre. Vulnerability, play, and shared learning form the basis for collective and transformative experiences.

This second iteration of TOOLSHED is in collaboration with Amarte.