Earlier this summer, I arrived as a foreigner coming to indulge in a Dutch summer. However, I also came as a museum intern preparing to enter a new world of professionalism. To better understand SAMA, I needed to learn about the institutions surrounding it. Anna gave me an ICOM museum card for the summer, which grants free access to museums all over the world. However, as I quickly learned, not every museum applied to this. On my museum journey, I had to ask myself a vital qu

On a particularly sunny afternoon, I waited beneath Kraaiennest Station in Amsterdam Zuid-Oost, an area I’d never been to before. Before our mural crawl with Bijlmer Boogie began, I found myself doing what I often do in a new place: looking around. I stood still near a pillar to take in my surroundings. It already felt different from the parts of Amsterdam I had come to know. Most notably, the pace was different: leisurely with this strong undertone of excitement. Soon, I met

Finding Words for a Journey I Had Already Begun "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world."— Ludwig Wittgenstein For the past four days I have been smiling. Not because I suddenly had a brilliant new idea. But because, after fifteen years of building the Street Art Museum Amsterdam (SAMA), I finally found the language to articulate something I had intuitively known all along. Sometimes our work evolves faster than our vocabulary. That is exactly what happened to

As I learned on July 1st, Keti Koti serves as both a day of remembrance and a celebration of freedom. It honors the resilience of those who endured slavery while celebrating the cultures, traditions, and communities that continue to flourish because of that resilience. “Keti Koti” or “Broken Chains” in Sranan Tongo, takes place on July 1st to commemorate the moment where slavery was abolished in Suriname and the former Netherlands Antilles on July 1st, 1863. In recent years,