On 1 November, Everyday Priorities – Art, Technology and Accommodations, returns with an evening of two new performative works by artists Flis Holland and Joy Mariama Smith that stretch the limits of communication, access, and perception. Together, the performances invite questions of connection, collectivity, and liberation – whether through an interstellar signal or the refusal of dominant sensory hierarchies. Join us in Amsterdam at Metro 54, for the next iteration of our ongoing collaboration with M-Cult (Helsinki).
Everyday Priorities–Art, Technology and Accommodations is a series of gatherings and new artistic commissions that explore, experiment with, and put into action alternative ways of commissioning, producing, and presenting artistic work, media art as well as dialogic and performative practices. As a collective (un)learning process, the project enhances the critical and speculative use of new technologies, different forms of hospitality, and access toolkits.
Flis Holland: 8 suspended at the bottom
(lecture performance, in English)
A trial for smart city innovations offers residents an extra hour per day via an abdominal implant— the pinnacle of personal efficiency. But the device misfires in users with already-slippery relationships to the clock such as the neurodivergent and the chronically ill. Swells and eddies of excess time spill into collective rifts, stabilising as temporal boltholes. In a live audio performance, parts of this soon-to-be-released public sound work are spoken back to, fretted into, and held fast in their excess.
Joy Mariama Smith: Untitled [Scents Sense]
(performance / installation, multi-lingual)
Untitled [Scents Sense] is a performative intervention that uses access intimacy and seemingly supportive technologies to consider the implications of Anosmia (aka ‘smell blindness’) in relation to colonial histories, diasporic identities and the hierarchy of the senses. In this intervention, assistive technologies in conjunction with audio and video, accompany selected smells in which the viewer is invited to consider, borders, boundaries, access, power, policing, stigmatization as well as collectivity, liberation, intimacy, care, migration, and resistance through the lens of the olfactory.
Practical Information
Everyday Priorities 01.11. at 19:00
Date: Nov 1, 2025
Time: 7pm
Location: Westerdoksdijk 597
Entrance: Free – Sign up here
Languages:
8 suspended at the bottom: English
Untitled [Scents Sense]: Multilingual
For participant:
Flis Holland’s piece is an audio performance. Joy Mariama Smith’s piece contains strong smells.
Accessibility:
That gathering space at Metro54 is located on the ground floor.
The doorway is 100 cm wide.
The doorway to the toilet is 80 cm wide. However, the toilet doesn’t meet the requirements to be deemed wheelchair accessible.
About:
Commissions are produced within Everyday Priorities – Art, Technology and Accommodations, a project by M-Cult (Helsinki) and Metro54 (Amsterdam) in collaboration with the Finnish Cultural Institute for the Benelux.
Everyday Priorities — Art, Technology and Accommodations is a series of gatherings and new artistic commissions that explore, experiment with, and put into action alternative ways of commissioning, producing, and presenting artistic work, media art as well as dialogic and performative practices. As a collective (un)learning process, the project enhances the critical and speculative use of new technologies, different forms of hospitality, and access toolkits.
Supported by the Ministry of Education and Culture, Finland and the Mondriaan Fonds, Netherlands.
About the artists
Flis Holland (UK/FI) tracks the collisions of neurodivergent, trans and celestial bodies. Using video, apps, and audio tours they try to resist visual capture and categorisation, to loosen the link between seeing a body and knowing it.
Holland’s solo show “Off-Colour” was at Helsinki Art Museum in 2023. Recent group shows incl. Oulun Taidemuseo, Pori Biennial, Pitted Dates and Bemis Center, plus screenings at Rakkautta & Anarkiaa, Uppsala, Kasseler Dokfest and BAFICI. In 2025 they are supported by a grant from Taiteen edistämiskeskus.
Joy Mariama Smith is a native Philadelphian currently based in Amsterdam, NL. Their work primarily addresses the conundrum of projected identities in various contexts. A sub-theme, or ongoing question in their work is: What is the interplay between the body and it’s physical environment?
Rooted in socially engaged art practice, they are a performance/installation/movement artist, activist, facilitator, curator, researcher, dramaturg and architectural designer. They have a strong improvisational practice spanning over 20 years. When they choose to teach, they actively try to uphold inclusive spaces.