A one-day event by curator Lesia Kulchynska in collaboration with de Appel, Sepp Eckenhaussen and Shared Visions.

Artistic practice is often a risky economic endeavor. In fact, many contemporary artists have to combine their exciting but underpaid artistic practice with other jobs in education, retail, web design, or any other field where their artistic skills can be converted into marketable services. While artistic practice is a space for freedom and experimentation with no guarantees of financial reward, the job market requires obedience to clients’ demands, in exchange for money. We want to challenge this dilemma, and relaunch the service industry on artistic terms.

We invite artists to join a one-day event, where they can present their artistic practice in the form of wayward, unique, and unreplicable service in exchange for money, something tangible or intangible, symbolic or material, straight on the market.

The artists are welcome to fashion a type of service that is not classified in a standard market service list, but that conveys valuable experience to others. This could be a nail design in a unique painterly manner, a lesson on whistling one’s favorite songs, a saying good-buy workshop, or anything else, suiting their specific and extraordinary experience, talents, and attitudes. Your potential customers most likely don’t know yet that they need this service, but we believe that they will appreciate it once they encounter your unexpected and precious offer. There are no limits except for the rule: the services cannot be modified upon the demand of the customer, only enjoyed as they are. We are, after all, still dealing with art.

With this project, our aim is to go beyond the logic of the service industry and invite artists to reinvent and appropriate the idea of “service” according to their needs and values. The artists participating in the project will become part of the emerging community of unclassified service providers.

All artists (and others) interested in this format and living in the Netherlands are invited to submit proposals to participate in the Service project. We look forward to your service proposal, which you would like to use as a tool for exchange with the broader community. We welcome individual as well as collective applications.

The four selected participants will share two market stalls at the Dappermarkt for one full day. On the market, they are free to sell or exchange their artistic service however they see fit. For a baseline income, each participant or collective will receive a fee of €300 (including taxes) and an €80 production budget.

Fill out the Google Form with a brief description (max. 150 words) of the proposed service idea and describe the type of exchange you envision (max. 100 words). Provide brief information about your occupation and artistic practice (max. 100 words).

• Show wit and the capacity to surprise;
• Propose artistic practice as a service (as opposed to offering the instrumental application of artistic skills as a service or offering artistically produced objects);
• Are likely to generate engagement with the people at the street market;
• Are feasible within the given limitations of space, time, and budget;
• Complement one another, so as to host a diversity of practices.

• 13 July: Application deadline.
• 21 July: Announcement of the selection.
• Ca. 31 July: Online preparation meeting. The participants, organisers, and production team will meet online to introduce themselves and their practices, and discuss the practical details of the market day.
• 5 September: Service at Dappermarkt.
• Ca. 7 September: Debriefing. Since this will be the first event of its kind in the Netherlands, we are keen to co-learn from the experience. We will host a get-together at de Appel to debrief and share experiences among all participants.

Service at Dappermarkt is a joint activity of Lesia Kulchynska’s Service, de Appel Kiosk, and Sepp Eckenhaussen’s Shared Visions. Each of the three is a long-term project aiming to manipulate the economic rules of artistic labour. In Service at Dappermarkt, they collaborate for the first time.

Service was initiated by curator Lesia Kulchynska. It functions as an online and offline platform for artists to offer unusual services and performative actions to the general public, in exchange for money, something material or immaterial, something symbolic, another kind of exchange, or just for free. Previous Service events have been organised in Kyiv and Kaunas (info here and here). The website is currently offline because of the war in Ukraine, but you can read about it here and here.

de Appel Kiosk is a series of events and interventions at Dappermarkt and Albert Cuypmarkt, two of Amsterdam’s most iconic street markets. Through the de Appel Kiosk endeavour, the organisation reflects on practices of exchange and barter in market economies. Read more about Kiosk here.

Shared Visions is a European project that aims to establish a transnational cooperative for visual artists – a democratic, solidarity-based structure committed to reshaping how artists live, work, and organize, especially in the Balkans and Eastern Europe, and across wider international contexts. In various contexts, it has been experimenting with visual art in barter economies. On behalf of Avans University, researcher and organiser Sepp Eckenhaussen is the Dutch partner within the Shared Visions consortium. Read more about the project here.

You can apply here