The Collective Is Showing in June. Here’s Why It Matters.
In June the collective I work from in Laakhaven is opening its studios to the public for the first time. Fifteen artists and designers, two days, the full warehouse. I’m designing the visual identity for it. This is not an advertisement — or rather, it is, but I want to explain what I mean when I say it matters and why you should consider coming.
The Maakhaven Open Studios will be in June — exact dates on the collective’s website when confirmed, but targeting the second weekend (Saturnusstraat, Laakhaven, Den Haag). The building is a former industrial warehouse that has been subdivided into working studios over the past decade. The fifteen people inside it are not a curated group selected by a cultural institution. They are people who needed affordable studio space in Den Haag and found it here, and over time built something that functions as a genuine community rather than a co-working arrangement.
What you’ll see when you come: working studios in actual use, not staged for the occasion. A ceramicist who fires in a kiln in the corner of her space. A sound artist whose studio has specific acoustic properties he spent three years building. A textile artist from Rotterdam who arrived two months ago and is already part of the building’s rhythm. And graphic designers, illustrators, and photographers who spend most of their time making work for clients and occasionally make work for themselves.
The Den Haag creative scene is genuinely difficult to see if you don’t know where to look. The institutions are mostly in the city centre — the Gemeentemuseum, the galleries around Denneweg. The actual working creative community is in places like Laakhaven and Binckhorst and the former industrial buildings that haven’t been converted into apartments yet. This is one of those places, and June is when it opens its doors.
I’ll write more as the date gets closer. In the meantime: mark the second weekend of June. I’ll post the confirmed dates when they’re set.
