Opstand – Anarchistische Plek 070

On Tuesday, we will be hosting a game night for people of all skill levels. Feel free to bring your own games. It will also be regular opening night, you are welcome to check the library too.

📅 Tuesday April 7th
⏲️ Time: 19h00 – 22h00
📍 De Opstand, The Hague (ask your network, DM, or e-mail for the address at boekenwinkelopstand@riseup.net)

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Accessibility information: the event is on the ground floor. There is a (steep) ramp for wheelchair accessibility. A quiet room is also available. The Opstand library and books are upstairs and only accessible via stairs. We encourage everyone to refrain from wearing products containing fragrances, to wear a face mask, to do a self-test and to stay home if you have cold-like symptoms. Face masks and self tests are available on location. Send us a message if your accessibility needs are not covered.

🎥 Do You Know That I’m With You (WIP) بىلەمسەن مەن سەن بىلەن بىللە
by Darya Andijan (Uyghur/Uzbek, Netherlands, 2024-ongoing). Docu-fiction.

This short movie is an artistic research project exploring political erasure of female history in the Uyghur region of China. Central to the film is Gülem, a mystical figure from Uyghur oral tradition linked to carpet weaving, whose fragmented legacy symbolizes silenced female makers. Through critical fabulation, myth-making, and Sufism, the director embarks on a journey across Transoxiana to piece together Gülem’s presence. The film weaves together imprisoned poet Gulnisa Imin’s verses, read by Uyghur women in diaspora, multi-voiced narration, and archival footage. Poetic yet narrative-driven, it evokes Gülem’s enduring presence through voices, images, and texts, confronting memory, resistance, and identity.

Discussion by @daryaaaandijan , filmmaker and artistic researcher from Central Asia.

📅 Friday April 3rd
⏲️ Time: 19h00 – 22h00
📍 De Opstand, The Hague (ask your network, DM, or e-mail for the address at boekenwinkelopstand@riseup.net)

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Accessibility information: the event is on the ground floor. There is a (steep) ramp for wheelchair accessibility. A quiet room is also available. The Opstand library and books are upstairs and only accessible via stairs. We encourage everyone to refrain from wearing products containing fragrances, to wear a face mask, to do a self-test and to stay home if you have cold-like symptoms. Face masks and self tests are available on location. Send us a message if your accessibility needs are not covered.

On April 14th, we will discuss chapters 1, 2, and 3 of the book “Undoing Suicidism”, by Alexandre Baril.

In Undoing Suicidism, Alexandre Baril argues that suicidal people are oppressed by what he calls structural suicidism, a hidden oppression that, until now, has been unnamed and under-theorized. Each year, suicidism and its preventionist script and strategies reproduce violence and cause additional harm and death among suicidal people through forms of criminalization, incarceration, discrimination, stigmatization, and pathologization. This is particularly true for marginalized groups experiencing multiple oppressions, including queer, trans, disabled, or Mad people.

Anyone is invited, whether you read it or not. The book is available to download at https://temple.manifoldapp.org/projects/undoing-suicidism

DM for the location.

📅 Tuesday April 14th

⏲️ Time: 19h00

📍 De Opstand, The Hague (ask your network, DM, or e-mail for the address at boekenwinkelopstand@riseup.net)

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Accessibility information: the event is on the ground floor. There is a (steep) ramp for wheelchair accessibility. A quiet room is also available. The Opstand library and books are upstairs and only accessible via stairs. We encourage everyone to refrain from wearing products containing fragrances, to wear a face mask, to do a self-test test and to stay home if you have cold-like symptoms. Face masks and self tests are available on location. Send us a message if your accessibility needs are not covered.

Join us on Sunday 19th of April, at 13:00 for a workshop on how to start using Reticulum.

Reticulum is the cryptography-based networking stack for building local and wide-area networks with readily available hardware. Reticulum can continue to operate even in adverse conditions with very high latency and extremely low bandwidth. The vision of Reticulum is to allow anyone to operate their own sovereign communication networks, and to make it cheap and easy to cover vast areas with a myriad of independent, interconnectable and autonomous networks. Reticulum is Unstoppable Networks for The People.

*Bring a laptop/smartphone if possible!

📅 Sunday April 19th
⏲️ Time: 13h00 – ?
📍 De Opstand, The Hague (ask your network, DM, or e-mail for the address at boekenwinkelopstand@riseup.net)
💶 Donation-based

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Accessibility information: the event is on the ground floor. There is a (steep) ramp for wheelchair accessibility. A quiet room is also available. The Opstand library and books are upstairs and only accessible via stairs. We encourage everyone to refrain from wearing products containing fragrances, to wear a face mask, to do a self-test test and to stay home if you have cold-like symptoms. Face masks and self tests are available on location. Send us a message if your accessibility needs are not covered.

🎥 Castration Movie by Louise Weard (Eng subs, Canada 2024/2025). Ongoing anthology drama film series.
Movie Anthology I: Trans sex worker Michaela mentors her newly-out friend Adeline while pursuing motherhood in Vancouver. Production assistant Turner slides toward inceldom as his relationship falls apart.
Movie Anthology II: Michaela navigates political and gender issues affecting marginalized people while trying to maintain her integrity as others attempt to manipulate her for their purposes.

Content Warning: many, we will inform specific ones before each block.

📅 Tuesday March 31st (Trans Day of Visibility)
⏲️ Time: 10h00 – 22h00
📍 De Opstand, The Hague (ask your network, DM, or e-mail for the address at boekenwinkelopstand@riseup.net)

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Accessibility information: the event is on the ground floor. There is a (steep) ramp for wheelchair accessibility. A quiet room is also available. The Opstand library and books are upstairs and only accessible via stairs. We encourage everyone to refrain from wearing products containing fragrances, to wear a face mask, to do a self-test and to stay home if you have cold-like symptoms. Face masks and self tests are available on location. Send us a message if your accessibility needs are not covered.

A note on radical accessibility for future Opstand events. We recently moved the Opstand to the upstairs of the space, which makes consulting the books and zines less accessible. Although, the events still happen at the lower floor. At the same time, we have slowly moved towards ignoring Covid. There is not much we can do about the first but there is something that can be done about the second.

We will also keep the space ventilated and we encourage everybody to:
• Do a self test if you can (we also have some in the space)
• Wear a mask if you can
• Do not come in you have symptoms

This might come as surprise for some but the pandemic is not over. To give a few numbers, 10% of infected people develop long term symptoms and Japan had the highest death rate since the pandemic began at the start of last year. This post is about promoting mutual aid and taking care of each other. Including also the people that cannot mask. As anarchists, we pride ourselves in making our own decisions instead of just listening to politicians. Yet, in this topic, we seem to just blindly follow the state policy.

For a deeper discussion on the topic, this zine is a good start https://en.scrappycapydistro.info/zines/pandemic-praxis and here is the reference for the 10% of long covid https://www.nature.com/articles/s41577-023-00904-7

As Pride The Hague 2024 approaches, we want to shed light on ongoing discussions De Opstand and fellow collectives have had with the organizing pride team.

This year, cops are official partners of the pride week, and although we have extensively voiced our disappointment and worries about this, our concerns have not been meaningfully listened to.

We hope this open letter brings transparency to the issue, and we, once again, urge the organizing team to take our concerns seriously and reflect on their choices.

A different Pride is possible, and we will keep dreaming of it.

Pride Open Letter

We do not want police at pride

After extensive discussions with COC Haaglanden, regarding the presence of cops at Pride, we still don’t feel heard and our community needs are not respected.

Our position is clear, we do not want police at our pride. Police presence at queer demonstrations have only stood to further instigate violence against us, rather than protect us from it. This has been the case both historically and within the recent past. To our greatest disappointment, the police force will be present at pride walk and at the opening party at Pride The Hague 2024.

Recently, in canal pride Leiden, we have witnessed violence against our community during pride. History keeps repeating itself. We do not want that to happen here at Pride The Hague.

The police and the system of border controls are well documented to be institutionally racist and perpetuate hatred toward queer people of color and queer migrants. Queer and trans people of color and migrants in our community do not feel safe around the police.

It’s possible to not have police force at pride: New York, London have done it!

There is international precedent for ending police presence at Pride: following the spread of the second wave of Black Lives Matter actions in summer 2020, New York City’s Pride, Vancouver Pride, and Toronto Pride ended police presence at the 2021 parade. The same is also true for Trans Pride in London. We urge Pride Den Haag to follow similar principled steps.

We have high hopes for what a Pride march and activities for queer liberation would include. We hope that Pride The Hague’s organizers will move closer to what a shared vision of pride and queer liberation would look like.

This open later is co-signed by QLU (Queer Leiden University) https://www.instagram.com/p/C64R6slIrYt

We have added all the books from our library to the “library thing” website. You can now check out what we have from home. To make sure we haven’t lent the book that you like, send us an email first to confirm that we have in the store at the moment. The link is in the menu above and also here: https://www.librarything.com/catalog/opstand.denhaag