Anti-Class - a Carrier Bag of Practices

Publication

B32 Artspace
Maastricht (NL)
2025

^{I’ve been in a lot of places where I’ve had to reword myself for.
Dilute for.
Translate for.
Package for.

Where the language of my care, or rage
especially when it was political,
got measured against institutional thresholds of acceptability.
Too raw, and Too personal.
Too much, always.
Or not enough.

I had to learn how to bend.
How to soften the edges of my truth so it could be held in cold hands.
But this Class was not that kind of space.

These white walls weren't waiting to be slathered with my eastern tale.

Instead:
There was a mat.
my mango.
and a moment I spoke freely.

"}

_{^{Excerpt from The Mango, the Mat, and the Moment I Spoke Freely

By Halar Soomro}}

_{^{Photo by anna andrejew}}

Anti-Class - a Carrier Bag of Practices

_{Anti-Class: A Carrier Bag of Practices grew out of our time together during the Anti-Class residency at B32 in Maastricht. It’s a bundle — of stories, recipes, reflections, and small experiments that held our time there. Each of us contributed something different: fragments from conversations, gestures from shared meals, notes that refused to resolve. I wrote about the spaces where care and politics meet, where language bends under institutional pressure, however something still manages to grow. Food runs through the book as both connector and contradiction. Its a way of being together that, carries memory, complicity, and tenderness all at once. Designed by Sjoerd Beijers and printed at the Jan van Eyck Academie, the book resists hierarchy; you’re meant to open it, untie the string, and read in any direction. It’s available at Limestone Books (Maastricht), San Seriffe (Amsterdam), and Page Not Found (The Hague) .}

_{^{Photo by

anna andrejew}}

^{"

Yet these micro-practices cannot be separated from macro-scale realities. While we nurture cracks underfoot, Palestinians are forced to navigate cracks in the geography of occupation—moving from one “safe zone” to another, their daily lives constrained by borders and displacement. The ethics of care embedded in tending urban cracks contrast sharply with global structures of violence and extraction. Micro attentiveness cannot replace engagement with injustice, but it can model a relational resilience: small acts of care that expose and contest larger systems of harm.

"}

^{_{Excerpt from

Anti-Class, against smoothness

By Sjoerd Beijers}}

^{"

I remember an email from my teacher,
when I asked for a letter of recommendation to support my visa.
She said it would be best
if I first wrote about why I deserve to stay here,
and then she would shape that into a letter.

A wonderful opportunity, she called it.
For me to advocate for myself.
“How was it that she didn't realise?” I asked myself,
After having advocated for myself since the moment I arrived.
Having contoured myself into acceptable fawn.

even the right to remain
must come from my own hand.
a self-portrait of desperation,
signed, dated, and ready to be co-signed
by someone who will never understand the cost.
"}

_{^{Excerpt from The Mango, the Mat, and the Moment I Spoke Freely

By Halar Soomro}}

^{"

Water levels are rising, and already a new society is forming within the old one. You can see it in the cracks, between the pavement stones where green shoots push through, where puddles gather and linger, refusing to disappear. Change is a process of trial and error, of unlearning and learning again. We have to discover how to live differently. And humans must be allowed to play, to break their chains, to imagine otherwise.

What do I need? Who am I? Who do I want to be? How do I want to live?

"}

_{^{Excerpt from

Each of Us Raindrops, Together We Flood by anna andrejew}}

_{^{Photo by

Işıl Çakmak}}

^{"

For many years, I studied in competitive architecture schools that placed individualism at the center. I felt with all my heart that this was very wrong. Trying and failing to do anything about it. Imaginative fantasies within a huge, old, dusty system.

But now, finally,

together,

anticlass...

"}

_{^{Excerpt from form follows emotion by

Işıl Çakmak}}

_{^{Photo by anna andrejew}}