STICHTING
SEVERS

FIGHT CLUB

Fight Club was initiated by Sam Zanardo and Merel Severs as part of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam’s Collective Practices Open Call for the acquisition of new work.

Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam · 27 Nov ’26 – 04 April ’27

Fight Club brings together a collective of queer and trans artists, activists, theorists, and martial arts practitioners who share a love and passion for what happens on the mat: where bruising, exhaustion, blood, and sweat meet discipline, repetition, attention, and poetry.

Stepping in the footsteps of our “fight-cestors” (those who know the value of fighting for something they believe in), Fight Club asks what happens when bodies, identities, and practices enter the ring together. What are the bodies we want to see in these rings?

And, at the same time, it claims: We do belong here, as much as you do.

A gallery space is transformed into a temporary dojo: a site for embodied knowledge production, collective training, rehearsal, and encounter. Rather than presenting a finished object, Fight Club proposes process itself as the artwork. The space is shaped through repetition, sweat, breath, contact, discipline, failure, and the ongoing practice of being together.

Members of the collective: Merel Severs, Sam Zanardo, Pennie Key, Senna Pauli, Birgit Welink, Yun Lee, Cain Wittenhaus, Li Bosveld, Aidan Okashi, Ahmed El Gendy, Barnaby Savage, Milou van Duijnhoven, Fernando Troya.

SLOW AND STEADY WINS THE RACE

Performance / physical theatre / dance · approx. 90 minutes · Premiere July ’27 · Touring autumn ’27

A shameless call for softness and healing. Slow and Steady Wins the Race is a physical and poetic performance about being lost and the search for stability. About being vulnerable in a world where you have to be so resilient.

In a new arena, a performative installation made up of training equipment, books and a flatscreen, Milou van Duijnhoven and Merel Severs practise their way toward a vital body, heart and mind. How do you find balance in a world where so much is possible? How do you soften in a world that can be so hard? And where do you find a foothold when you lose your direction? A series of exercises and texts facilitates their search for comfort and meaning. They let themselves be guided by artists such as Björk, Clarice Lispector, CHARLI XCX, Mary Oliver, Rumi and the Greek huntress Atalanta. By dancing, training, reading and connecting with the audience, they surrender to the unstable path of recovery, where failing and hoping are allowed. Two bodies, fighting for softness.

A physical and performative inquiry into art as medicine, in a system that keeps undermining its value.

Produced by Stichting Severs. Coproduced by TAR, decoproducers. With thanks to Cultuurfonds, Theater Utrecht, Dance Space Destiny and productiehuis Frascati.