Onze Ambassade Festival #7
Program 06.09.2025
19:00 till 01:00 hrs
Entry: Gratis, RSVP required
Tickets: RSVP here


On Saturday 6 September, West Den Haag invites you to an immersive evening of contemporary art, experimental sound, performance, and film. Spread across the former American embassy, a monumental building designed by Marcel Breuer, this one-night-only event brings together artists, musicians, and thinkers from around the world.

During this evening, you’ll experience a continuous program of new exhibitions, live performances, screenings, and music. You’ll witness how art can create space for reflection, imagination, and encounter. From installations to confrontational performances and boundary-pushing musical acts, the program explores the role of institutions, and how memory, dreams, and identity shape our view of the world — and how we might question and reimagine that view together.

The evening is free and open to the public — feel free to wander, wonder, and engage.


New exhibitions

1. Razia Barsatie & Sarojini Lewis - Labyrinth Within
Through installations, videos, archival photographs, and performances, this exhibition offers a personal reflection on Hindustani family history, spirituality, and identity. Room by room, a layered experience unfolds, where Ogri Eye, domestic objects, and images come together. The exhibition evokes memory and silence, but also the moment they are disrupted. An intimate invitation to reflect, showing how art can create space for meaning.

2. Shivani Gowda - The Department of Destruction
The Memorialist has vanished, leaving behind a ransacked office and unanswered questions. Two colleagues from the Department of Destruction arrive to complete the audit: should West remain independent, join the state system, or be shut down? In a Socratic dialogue, this part-theatre, part-bureaucratic séance performance explores disappearance, institutional decay, and the fate of art in systems that consume, exploit, and abandon - asking the quiet, relentless question: what now?

3. ALPHABETUM XV - Born in Dreams
West presents a new exhibition in the Alphabetum, a space dedicated to alphabets, language, and imagination. Located in the former library of the American embassy, this edition explores writing systems born from dreams, scripts imagined during sleep and later developed into real notation systems. Surrounded by three unique book collections, the exhibition invites visitors to reflect on the boundaries between thought and form, sleep and creation, language and the unknown.

4. Édouard Glissant — Hans-Ulrich Obrist’s archive (ongoing)
Édouard Glissant (1928–2011) was a visionary Martinican philosopher, poet, and novelist whose ideas on Relation, creolization, and Mondialité offer a powerful lens for understanding identity, diversity, and global interconnectedness. Rooted in the Caribbean experience, his thought embraces difference without erasure. This exhibition features rare video recordings of Glissant and a series of posters by contemporary artists inspired by his work, keeping his ideas urgently alive for today’s world.


Music Program
Curator: Alex Andropoulos

Clément Vercelletto
Clément Vercelletto is a french electronic and folk musician focusing on experimental methods of creating extremely textured abstract sound / music, dance music and folk music. His project 'L’Engoulevent' is arguably a mix of all three, taking form as an installation based concert and recorded album, centered around the instrument made in collaboration with the instrument maker Léo Maurel.
L’Engoulevent is a wind instrument based on a portable organ windchest, functioning as both sculpture and autonomous musical instrument. As Varcelleto says in his own words ‘I thought of the instrument around the idea of a sound landscape, an invented, fantasized landscape. The instrument plays the nature and the music of a fictional ecosystem.’
More information
https://unjenesaisquoi.bandcamp.com/

Passepartout Duo
Passepartout Duo is formed by Italian pianist Nicoletta Favari and American Italian percussionist Christopher Salvito. Drawing from a carefully selected palette of electro-acoustic textures and shapeshifting rhythms, Passepartout Duo’s work investigates the way in which we listen to and connect with sound. Reassessing the tools they use to create their music, the group is continually developing a specialized and evolving ecosystem of handmade musical instruments that have ranged from analog electronic circuits and conventional percussion, to room-size textile installations and found objects.
Looking for ways of sustaining an independent musical career and shaping an international network of artists and musicians, the group has been on a nearly continuous world tour ever since they began collaborating in 2015, and their experiences traveling have heavily influenced their creative process.



Elastic Systems
Elastic Systems is the electronic live dance music duo of Thomas Durand and Arnaud Aubry,  both based in Nantes, France. They have been experimenting with electronic drum kits and MIDI technology to create songs in between chiptune, IDM, krautrock and experimental music, borrowing sounds from video game music, sound effects and a variety of musical genres. The resulting sound stretches into elastic semi-improvised compositions, which continuously distend and deform, producing quirky and technical musical shapes.
For purposes of permanent renewal and experimentation, the sample banks of both synths and drum kit are rich in sonic vocabulary, so that each song has its own energy and identity. Roles can also switch, when the synthesizer plays percussively and the drum kit takes on the melodic role of bass or piano, allowing to create innovative musical shapes.



REZZETT
Rezzett is the UK electronic dance music duo of Jackson Bailey (AKA Tapes) and Luke Blair (AKA Lukid and Refreshers). Initially creating a buzz through several esoteric YouTube uploads, the duo have gone on to release five EPs and two albums on Will Bankhead’s influential label, The Trilogy Tapes.
The music is hazy, distorted dance music that sounds like memories of music, infused and contorted by dreams and substance abuse, uncomfortably but desirably stuck in one's head, serving as an intricate and unique possible example of Hauntological dance music. Their live performances are somewhat rare, so their set at West will be one to remember.
More information
https://rezzett.bandcamp.com/

AND MORE!

DJs
Later in the evening, the Alphabetum becomes a space for carefully selected DJ sets (t.b.c.), featuring a mix of experimental sounds and rhythms that resonate with the atmosphere of the festival.