24 - 26.11.2026
Against Ageism in the Cave
Culture in the Cave takes shape this year as a series of curated journeys and encounters designed to strengthen our collective and deepen its social and cultural connections. These thematic gatherings create spaces to share experiences, exchange knowledge, meet practitioners and experts, and engage directly with different artistic practices.
Against Ageism in the Cave explores age, time, bodies, queerness, and the ways social and institutional structures shape how we understand ourselves and one another. Led by writer, artist, curator, and philosopher Simon(e) van Saarloos, the three-day programme moves between lecture, conversation, collective reading, and artistic exchange.
Drawing from Van Saarloos’ Against Ageism: A Queer Manifesto and their ongoing research into queer and trans approaches to time, the programme invites students to question linear narratives of development, productivity, identity, and ageing, and to imagine other ways of inhabiting time.
Programme
Tuesday, 24 November
17:00–18:30 | Artist Talk + Q&A
At the school
Simon(e) van Saarloos will introduce their practice and current research, with a focus on Against Ageism: A Queer Manifesto and questions around age, time, queerness, and the politics of the body. The talk may also open into Simon(e)’s ongoing research around transness and Trans Before Trans, inviting students to think beyond fixed categories and chronological narratives.
Followed by a conversation and Q&A with the students.
Wednesday, 25 November
11:30–18:30 | Group Conversations with Simon(e) van Saarloos
At the school
A full day of conversation and exchange. Building on the questions introduced in the talk, the session will explore non-linear approaches to time, artistic and social expectations around age, and the ways bodies are regulated through ideas of development, productivity, maturity, and identity.
24-25-26 November
10:00–17:00 | Individual Exchanges with Florence Parot
At the school
An open and conversational day of individual exchanges, allowing the discussions and questions emerging from the thematic, to develop through the students’ own practices, interests, and experiences.
Contributor
Simon(e) van Saarloos
Simon(e) van Saarloos is a writer, artist, curator, and philosopher based between Amsterdam and Berkeley, US. They are the author of six books, including Against Ageism: A Queer Manifesto (Emily Carr University Press, 2023), Take ’Em Down: Scattered Monuments and Queer Forgetting (2021), and Playing Monogamy (2019). Their work moves between writing, performance, artistic collaboration, and curatorial practice, engaging with questions of queerness, sexuality, time, memory, power, and social structures.
As an independent curator, Van Saarloos has developed public programmes, exhibitions, performances, and artistic collaborations, including queer programming for IDFA, Cruising Gezi Park at the Amsterdam Museum, Juicy Refuge at the Rietveld Academy, and the long-term transnational queer community and art project Through the Window. They are currently pursuing a PhD in Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, where their research engages with the rhetorical possibilities of existence beyond defence.
Their practice brings together queer, feminist, artistic, philosophical, and embodied forms of research, continually questioning the boundaries between existing and emerging fields of knowledge.
Simon(e) is also curating AGERAGE, an exhibition at MU Hybrid Art House Eindhoven, opening in March 2027.
The week before (18-22 Nov), Simon(e) will be at the What You See performance festival in Utrecht, presenting work around waiting, the gender clinic, and linear time, while also taking part in an experiment on duration, This Could Go On Forever, with Shuli Branson and Phoebus Osborne.