The Limits of My Language

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 me in Ghent during ESEE2026.

We didn't change. Our language did.

For more than fifteen years SAMA has worked in Amsterdam Nieuw-West alongside artists, residents, children, schools, housing associations, researchers and countless community partners.

We painted murals. We documented disappearing artworks. We collected neighbourhood stories. We created gardens. We trained youth workers. We preserved heritage. We experimented with digital archives. We invited children to become observers of their own neighbourhood. If someone had asked me what we were doing, I would probably have answered: Community art. Or perhaps: Participation. Or: Co-creation. All of those descriptions were true. None of them were complete.

A museum without knowing it

Over the years I have often been asked a seemingly simple question: "What exactly is Street Art Museum Amsterdam?" The honest answer has always been surprisingly difficult. We are not a traditional museum. We are not simply a public art organisation. Nor are we only a heritage institution, an educational platform or a community initiative. Every one of those descriptions contains a part of the truth. None of them explains the whole. I always knew those labels felt too small. I simply didn't know why.

Enter Athena

Preparing our presentation together with colleagues from STRAATWIJS by the Athena Institute at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam forced me to look at SAMA through a different lens. What I appreciated from the very beginning was that this wasn't a collaboration in which one partner was expected to fit into the framework of the other. It was genuine co-creation. Athena brought conceptual frameworks, research traditions and the language of citizen science. SAMA brought fifteen years of lived practice. Neither was complete without the other. The collaboration didn't transform SAMA into something academic.

It revealed that many of the questions we had been asking in neighbourhoods for years were already part of much larger conversations taking place across disciplines. For the first time, I realised that our work did not need translating. It already belonged.

Suddenly, I understood the room

At ESEE2026 I listened to economists discussing well-being. Ecologists speaking about biodiversity. Anthropologists exploring indigenous knowledge. Researchers presenting Living Labs. Museum professionals questioning institutional authority. Citizen scientists working alongside local communities.

Again and again I found myself thinking: We do this. Not in exactly the same way. But fundamentally the same. The words were different. The underlying philosophy was remarkably familiar. For the first time, I wasn't trying to explain SAMA to academia. I was recognising SAMA within academia. That distinction changed everything.

Communities already create knowledge

One presentation showed a diagram connecting Traditional Ecological Knowledge, Academic Knowledge and public policy. Most people probably saw a framework for environmental governance. I saw Nieuw-West. I saw murals. I saw neighbourhood gardens. I saw children interviewing elderly residents. I saw artists documenting collective memory. I realised that our communities have never simply participated in knowledge. They have always produced it. The role of SAMA has never been to bring knowledge into neighbourhoods. It has been to recognise, connect, preserve and activate the knowledge that is already there. That realisation changed everything.

Marcel Duchamp suddenly made sense

At exactly the same time I happened to be reading The Duchamp-Courbet Case. For years I had admired Marcel Duchamp's La Boîte-en-valise as a fascinating work of art. Only now did I understand its deeper implication.

Duchamp wasn't simply creating a portable museum. He was questioning one of the museum's most fundamental assumptions.

• What if a museum was not primarily a building?

• What if it was a methodology?

• What if knowledge could travel?

• What if relationships mattered more than walls?

  
  

For the first time I saw an unexpected parallel. SAMA has never had one monumental building. Our collection lives on neighbourhood walls. In people's memories. In digital reconstructions. In conversations. In gardens. In schools. In research partnerships. Perhaps we were never missing a museum building. We were missing the language to describe the museum we had already built. Perhaps we had been quietly building a different kind of museum all along.

Children, Judge Your Adults

One photograph I took in Ghent stayed with me. On the wall of Viernulvier, where the closing dinner of ESEE2026 took place, a large street poster simply read: "Children, Judge Your Adults." Coincidence? Perhaps.

But I found myself returning to it again and again. It captured something much larger than public art. For generations adults have decided what counts as knowledge, heritage and expertise. Yet so much of our work at SAMA begins by asking children and residents a different question: "What do you see that we have stopped seeing?" That is not simply participation. It is knowledge production.

The world caught up

Looking back, I realise something important. SAMA did not suddenly become interested in citizen science.

Citizen science developed a language that allowed me to recognise what SAMA had already been doing. The projects didn't change. The philosophy didn't change. My vocabulary changed. As Wittgenstein suggested, the limits of my language quietly expanded. And with them, my understanding of our own work.

One stroke at a time

People often ask why I chose street art. Today I think they are asking the wrong question. Street art was never the destination. It was the language that allowed communities to speak, remember, question and imagine together.

Museums cannot solve climate change. Researchers cannot solve social inequality. Artists cannot rebuild trust on their own. Communities cannot carry these responsibilities alone. But together? Perhaps we can.

In conversation with local scientists, guides, and Indigenous waterkeepers, La Memoria del Agua asks: How does water move through this place? Who has access to it, and who decides how that access is distributed? When water disappears—or is forcibly disappeared—where does it go, and what traces does it leave behind? 

Every mural begins with a single stroke. One stroke changes very little. Yet stroke after stroke. Wall after wall. Conversation after conversation. Neighbourhoods begin to transform. Perhaps ideas transform in exactly the same way. One conversation. One collaboration. One community. One child asking a courageous question. One researcher willing to listen. One artist making invisible knowledge visible. One stroke at a time.

This is only the beginning

I left Ghent with something much more valuable than conference proceedings. I left with a new vocabulary. Not because it changed SAMA. Because it helped me understand what SAMA has been becoming all along.

Perhaps every generation has to reinvent the museum.

• The nineteenth century asked what was worth collecting.

• The twentieth century asked what could be considered art.

• The twenty-first century may ask a different question altogether: How do museums help societies recognise the knowledge that already exists within their communities?

For years funders asked me what was innovative about SAMA. I always answered by describing projects. The murals. The digital archive. The neighbourhood garden. The educational toolkit. Today I realise I was answering the wrong question. The innovation was never any single project. It was a simple assumption that quietly guided every project from the very beginning: Knowledge does not begin with institutions. It begins with people.

Everything else followed from that. Perhaps Marcel Duchamp taught us that a museum does not need walls. Perhaps the communities of Amsterdam Nieuw-West have taught me something equally important.

A museum does not begin with a collection either. It begins with recognising that people have always been collecting knowledge together. The rest is simply finding the courage, and the language, to call it a museum.

For years I struggled to explain what SAMA was. Some understandably saw another street art festival. Others a mural producer. Others a community arts organisation. All of those descriptions contain part of the truth. None of them explain why we exist. Only now do I realise that every project we have developed, from murals and neighbourhood gardens to digital preservation and citizen science, has been asking the same question: How can museums help make visible the knowledge that already exists within communities?

Perhaps that is what SAMA has been trying to become all along. Not simply a community museum. But a museum that begins with the belief that knowledge is created through relationships, lived experience, creativity and dialogue. A museum where the collection is not only artworks. It is the knowledge communities create together.

And perhaps that is why I have been smiling these past four days. Not because I discovered a new direction. Because I finally found the language to describe the road we had been walking all along.

Our projects were never random.

They were all expressions of the same idea.

We just hadn't named the idea yet.