How to plant weeds at a Crossroads?
Workshopping technopolitical practices for a future together
When: Friday, October 30th, 16:30–19:00
Where: Fossil Free Culture NL studio, Overtoom 301, Amsterdam
In collaboration with: Léa Shamaa / AlterTech
In this Open Gathering, we would like to have an open discussion about what it means to build crossroads between activism, art, infrastructure and technologies, in the broad sense of these terms, and how we can think together about the alternative futures we want to craft. If we want to move beyond Big Tech, neoliberal domination and the worsening polycrisis, alternative networks such as .d.a.s. can set up the rhizomes that resist today’s hegemonic structures and prefigure the futures we want as a collective. We invite a discussion on your visions of utopia and diversity, and on the generative paths of action and resistance that can lead us out of the polycrisis.
What tools do we need to plant these weeds at every crossroad, so they can grow freely, far and wide? What world do you fantasise about? How can we get there together?
Sketching a workshop, together
This gathering is also a working session. Together with Léa, we will be sketching a workshop that .d.a.s. will give in the future at AlterTech. That means we won’t only talk: we will try out exercises, test them on our own bodies and ideas, and shape them as we go, following the ecological metaphors of weeds, compost and rhizomes that run through our work. Everyone who comes is invited to take part in that process, and your input will help decide what the workshop becomes.
No need to know .d.a.s. or AlterTech beforehand. We’ll start with a short introduction to both projects.
Agenda
16:30 · Arriving, snacks and welcome
16:45 · Introductions: what is .d.a.s., what is AlterTech
17:15 · Open conversation: planting weeds at the crossroads
17:45 · Trying out exercises for the future workshop
18:30 · Harvest: what worked, what to change, what to keep growing
19:00 · Closing
This is a .d.a.s. session, which means it is also an artwork, a rehearsal, and an open question.
As always, there will be snacks to share. Bring something if you’d like.
Want to join us? Send us a little message at das@fossilfreeculture.nl
Image: Paes Leão
About Léa Shamaa
Léa Shamaa is a researcher at AlterTech, with a background in Media Studies and Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. She has been writing about community spaces, open access movements and alternative infrastructures in the Netherlands, published in several cultural and academic spaces. Her previous research, conducted in collaboration with the open-source activist group OpenTech (AUC), examined the structural dependencies on Big Tech within higher education, with a focus on digital self-governance, social hacking and hacker ethics in university spaces. At AlterTech, she works with technologies beyond the digital sense and partners with technopolitical communities committed to crafting and building radical spaces through infrastructural interventions that interrupt the anti-utopian present. Her research centres on radical action and utopian and technodiverse futures. She looks at peer-run communities, such as .d.a.s., who craft, build and assemble their own alternative technologies and infrastructures of pedagogy, resistance and action for a more hopeful future. Key questions driving her work include: How can technopolitical activations prefigure utopian futures? And how does radical hope operate in practice?
Crafting Techtopias: Prefigurative Politics, Utopian Action, and Technodiverse Futures among Ecosystems of Technopolitical Practice in The Netherlands
AlterTech
Across Asia, activists face mounting restrictions and technologically-enhanced surveillance, repression, and control. The project Activist Techtopias: Crafting Alternate Infrastructures of Resistance in Asia, or AlterTech – funded by an ERC (European Research Council) Consolidator Grant – examines how activists navigate these constraints by experimenting with new technological practices and reconfiguring their infrastructures from the ground up.
We take a broad view of “technology” and “infrastructure” – decentring the digital and foregrounding the vernacular – to explore how activists craft tools and reassemble systems in response to real-world challenges. By studying everyday acts of resistance – and examining how hemispheric connections, embodied practices, and utopian imaginaries also shape activist trajectories – we aim to uncover emerging forms of technopolitics that often remain invisible in conventional discourses of activism.
Grounded in decolonial approaches to technology as well as to research, our team combines rigorous ethnographic.
analysis with collaborative, co-creative methods. We believe engaged scholarship – developed with, rather than about, research participants – can generate meaningful insights and interventions during times of deepening constraint.
The project runs from 2026 until 2031 at the Anthropology Department of the University of Amsterdam, and is embedded in the programme group Moving Matters: People, Goods, Power and Ideas.
