Our mission is to form a sustainable artistic community that contributes and gives back to society through its activities. The way we program and create inform how we see both physical and experimental space, led and supported by changemakers. We want to accelerate the path to an inclusive future and explicitly make room for people who are being held back by our current capitalist society, such as young people, queer people, people with a migration background or people with economic disadvantage.
We inject the otherwise neat Haarlem,with the necessary progressive impulses. We want to inspire our audience with this attitude. Nieuwe Vide chooses an accessible approach to its visitors and we emphasize their options to participate. We take care of this experimental space with our 35 studio tenants and approximately 150 others who are closely involved in different ways on an annual basis, as artists, educators, through a collective or as a participating audience. Many visitors or participants have become volunteers, find a home in one of the communities that meet with us, or are given a voice in an exhibition.
Nieuwe Vide builds on a tradition of presentation and production of socially involved art. Over the past five years we have developed emphatically into a place that moves at the intersection of art and activism; Through the art projects we not only consider the world around us, we encourage action, inspire positive impact and develop the tools with artists and participants to achieve this.
Our activities and actions are rooted in the following core values:
Nieuwe Vide is an art platform and cultural hub, two collaborative functions that we use to realize our mission. As an art platform, we realize an artistic program, with new productions, and we make new artistic and social trends available to the public. As a cultural hub, we offer development opportunities for artists, the makers in our studios, involved collectives, and participants in educational programs. The cultural hub offers depth to the art platform, and the art platform gives new impulses to the cultural hub. By maintaining the guideline that at least two-thirds of the studios are rented by professional artists, we ensure a strong artist centered community. Rather than working with a waiting list, when a studio becomes available to rent, we evaluate and collectively choose new tenants that contribute to what is needed at that moment to strengthen our cultural ecosystem.
With our program we create space for reflection and dialogue about accessibility, privilege, the layered nature of our personal identities, and the complexity of diverse perspectives with which we (can) view the world. We prefer work that informs us about forms of oppression and specifically works toward liberation. Nieuwe Vide actively works on growing as a circular community, where we develop, pass on and maintain skills together. We initiate projects that unfold in groups and thus stimulate the emergence of new collectives. We expect the artists we invite to show interest and investment in our broader communities, and we in return embrace them as full participants in Nieuwe Vide.
We operate on a queer and intersectional foundation. We feel a healthy resistance to normative social frameworks that require people to conform to clear and one-dimensional identity expressions. For us, the principle of queering means celebrating the idiosyncrasies, the (mix of) personal preferences, interests and creative forms of self-expression that makes humanity a beautiful kaleidoscope. Although often presented as connecting, we see that ‘normativity’ excludes and limits. We embrace the liberating nature intrinsic to queerness that it encourages exploration of identity and experience. For us, this goes hand in hand with promoting intersectional thinking and action. By focusing on intersectionality, we sharpen our awareness that the way in which one deviates from the ‘norm’ is different for everyone. These differences depend on visible and invisible properties. We understand that this can mean an accumulation of challenges in the fight for self-determination..
At Nieuwe Vide we believe that organizing and facilitating belong together. We continually work towards different forms of accessibility. Therefore we offer cultural initiatives and collectives spaces to meet, present, and exchange knowledge. We offer informal guidance in the development of artistic projects, facilitate presentation space if the agenda allows it, and do not hesitate to give visibility to the social messages of third parties if they are in line with our mission.
We work with care, make time for each other and work with intention. There is space to breathe in our activities calendar; exhibitions and the run-up to them are relatively long. We immerse ourselves in the needs of the makers and move with change. We adopt a flexible approach, honor ideas and actively attract people with knowledge and skills that align and further the values and mission of Nieuwe Vide. Looking back and evaluating together are crucial parts of our working method, to ensure safe and open forms of communication – even when this is difficult or confrontational.