TOOLSHED #2 : The Imaginary Stage

The Imaginary Stage: Rehearsing through Puppets, Play, and Other Tools

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 and Kerem 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.

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.

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.

This second iteration of TOOLSHED is in collaboration with Amarte.