Linda Zeb Hang
Attuning the Dramaturgy: Poetic Enjambments / Conditions of the Squat
Wood, text mural, printmaking sink, plastic roofing, theatre curtain, Rotterdam community garden water tank, soil, potato plants, acrylic paint, loudspeaker, technics record player, mic, Detroit and Hip Hop records, crowbars, distiller, anarchist books, burner cans, protest posters, textiles, biscuits, chips, apples, coffee and tea maker
Dimensions variable
2025
A garden is a body that cannot be possessed
Its secret is beautiful because it belongs to no one
Though some have exploited it
Its true nature cannot be controlled
Spent the month of May living in and ATTUNING this dramaturgy of an environment we crafted by hand at W139 in Amsterdam NL. It is a sonic and visual FRAMEWORK. An occupied space for INTELLECTUAL SQUATTERS like me to articulate POETIC ENJAMBMENTS, shaping character with each other in this former performance theatre and artist-driven space. It channels the conditions of the squat—survival, care, resistance—through architecture, movement, print, and sound.
LZH–DHZW–PPP Exhibition
May 23 — July 27, 2025
W139
139 Warmoesstraat
Amsterdam NL
Installation Photos:
Pieter Kers | Beeld.nu
A garden is a body that cannot be possessed
Its secret is beautiful because it belongs to no one
Though some have exploited it
Its true nature cannot be controlled
Every material—from soil, potato plants, protest murals to crowbars, records, and a printshop sink—honors those invisible codes communities have always lived by, even when unacknowledged.
The Garden of Learning is the artery area, located in the center of speech, writing, and dance. Grounded and rooted in the Rotterdam ⁄ Amsterdam grow community, these archival sub-textures reveal traces of the people’s multiplicity, complexities, and geographies. It is canopied by tent-like theatre curtain drapery, while rhythmically painted edges act as score-making, placing the colors as nods to movement building.
Close by is a Listening Sessions Station where you can listen to my other collective: Detroit’s Sterling Toles’ music with Wes Taylor’s record design. Their deep roots in printshop, Underground Resistance, Motown, and Archer vinyl pressing plant invite the plants to grow in the way of the village’s faith. A second spine to W139’s site of origin, with Ceremony as a gesture to consider how structure, sound, and freedom interact.
Inhabiting the architectural, columnist vertices feel like encountering tall trees that make up a grove in an encoded forest where the poems, prints, textiles, books, and oral stories can breathe, iterate, and support one another.
The artist’s 6 week journey to Flint and Detroit MI as an honorary community member in 2024 inspired them to build the squat as part of a transnational network of contested infrastructures, where the right to water and the right to build are inseparable struggles.
Organized and initiated by the artist, the public was invited to meaningfully participate and build culture with these learning environments in the framework of a Community Center on July 13, 2025 at W139 in Amsterdam NL. Youth participants from Iran, Cyprus, Turkey, Italy, France, Belgium, NYC, and California created rhythmic publications and workshops while transducing the space into their own.