The term weekender comes from the club scene and refers to events that fill the weekend with collective experience and a release from linear time. AM.PM.AM. is a continuous experience with fluid forms of interaction between art and audience. For each edition, Nest collaborates with an artist or collective, featuring contributions from interdisciplinary creators: from DJs and performers to visual artists and collectives.
Nest transforms with each weekender. Boundaries between disciplines blur again and again, shaped by the vision of the guest curator—from musical stage to audiovisual installation, with rehearsals, installations, and interactive moments alternating throughout. As a visitor, you're invited to move freely through the spaces, jumping from exhibition space to club environment. The creative process takes center stage and unfolds within a constantly changing scenography.
During the weekenders, you can expect a wide-ranging program: from performances, listening sessions, and installations to DJ sets, concerts, open rehearsals, film screenings, workshops, and conversations with the artists.
About Weekender 1: Tutto Questo Sentire
Tutto Questo Sentire (TQS) is a creative collective that explores the connection between different art forms. Since 2014, it has brought together artists from music, visual art, and performance, with a focus on sound and how it relates to video, time, environment, and live performance.
At the heart of their work lies the question: What remains after a creative experience or performance ends? TQS explores this by creating moments in which both space and audience become active participants in the artistic process. From the industrial spaces of Het HEM to the classical setting of Rome’s botanical gardens, from concert halls to experimental club venues, TQS treats every location as a laboratory to push the boundaries between sound, space, and the human experience.
Collaboration is a core principle of the collective: TQS works through long-term relationships and friendships with artists, musicians, and other makers and thinkers. Each collaboration prioritizes experimentation, resulting in a wide variety of presentations—from operas and light-and-sound installations to films and exhibitions.
About Weekender 2: swellS & Make It Fit—A Life Script
swellS
swellS is a new audiovisual collaboration between band Spill Gold (Rosa Ronsdorf and Nina de Jong) and Studio Noralie (Noortje van den Eijnde), that will premiere at Nest in Laak during this edition of AM.PM.AM. Blurring the lines between sculpture, textiles, and performance, the piece recalls the ripple effect – a metaphor for ecological entanglement and the interconnectedness of all living beings. swellS will take shape as both a 50-minute live show on Friday evening and a standalone installation that is on view only during this weekend at Nest.
Make It FitMake It Fit—A Life Script will take place on Sunday evening and is a one-hour multidisciplinary performance by Tingyi Jiang that explores how language constructs authority, identity, and social norms by anatomizing the internalized societal script of ‘Make It Fit’. Set within a constructed situation, it blends public address, personal narrative, sonic composition, and improvised interaction, where language becomes a live negotiation between self, structure, and collective imagination. The project transforms “fitting” into a performative strategy, challenging conformity while proposing a sustainable, adaptive model for critical artistic practice.
Make It Fit — A Life Script emerged from an urgent need to process and respond to the forces of authoritative language that has shaped Tingyi Jiang's experience both personally and socially. Growing up in China, she was immersed in a cultural environment shaped by the maxim "make it fit." This phrase, rooted in Confucian values and extending to political ideologies, parental expectations and social norms. The idea of “fitting” wasn’t merely a set of abstract rules, but a deeply internalized choreography that governed my behavior, voice and identity.
In the context of an ever-evolving social and political landscape, Jiang's artistic practice is in constant negotiation with the world around it. The increasing demands for conformity in both personal and public life, amplified by digital media, economic pressures, and political shifts—demand not only new modes of expression, but new ways of inhabiting the role of the artist in public life.
About Weekender 3: Ariadne Randall - Our Mouths Are Spring
On March 6th to 8th, Nest in Laak presents the third edition of AM.PM.AM,. aThis series of interdisciplinary weekender programmes that merges art, performance and music throughout the day and night. The upcoming edition of AM.PM.AM is in collaboration with artist, composer and writer Ariadne Randall. At Nest in Laak, she premieres the solo opera Our Mouths Are Spring within an immersive installation with video and sound.
The installation brings together a brand new generative 3D video work, sculptural works and drawings around the question: can we do with sound and image what algorithms do with minds and experiences? Randall developed her solo opera Our Mouths Are Spring together with artist Matthew D. Gantt and based it on her poem What To Do With It When It Comes. The poem is about promises and intimacy, and how they are intertwined with technology and consumption. Ever since Instagram introduced the modern algorithmic feed in 2015, our screens, eyes and minds have been continuously flooded with addictive images and data tailored to our suspected desires. Dating profiles, Amazon shopping carts, social media videos, (fake) video games and news feeds come to us in an endless loop of non-repetition. Parallel to these data streams, an abundance of products and materials is shipped in containers all around the world and delivered to our doorsteps.
With Our Mouths Are Spring, Ariadne Randall investigates how internet infrastructure, commodity flows, subjects, bodies, and emotions such as love and pleasure are tangled in the present. The hour-long video installation presented during AM.PM.AM. will be different each time, based on shipping, climate, and internet traffic data. It mimics and mirrors our various algorithmic feeds, whilst trying to steer towards an alternative aesthetic experience that encourages greater awareness of this entanglement.
On Friday night, the installation will be activated with a live performance of the opera by Randall. On Saturday night, writer (and frequent collaborator) McKenzie Wark, will give a performative reading soundtracked by Randall. This reading will be followed by a club night in collaboration with Club Laak, during which the installation will still be on view. On Sunday afternoon, an artist talk with Randall and McKenzie Wark will take place, starting from a text that Wark wrote especially for this AM.PM.AM edition. The installation Our Mouths Are Spring will be running continuously throughout the weekend and is free to visit outside the performance times..
About Ariadne Randall
Ariadne Randall is an American artist, composer and writer based in Vienna. In her work, she uses worldbuilding through transmedia narrative. Through strategies of material depth and formal juxtaposition, she creates spaces for imagination in sound, language and image. She holds degrees in classical composition and contemporary art from UCLA and Bard MFA. Her work has been presented widely, from Lincoln Center in New York to a recent song cycle for the Volksoper Wien and countless basements performances. Her performance Reverse Cowgirl Quartet rides her gender transition towards larger questions of identity and becoming. Her debut record as a transgender woman was released to critical acclaim in 2024 on Oxtail Recordings.
