City Talks Amsterdam: Recipes for Change
What can we learn from the ways we cook, care, and create together? In this edition of CityTalks, we invite artists, thinkers, and makers to reflect on how people make a place in the world.
Together, we explore how people live with multiple histories, cultures and identities at once, and how everyday practices help us navigate belonging. From cooking and craft to storytelling and performance, we look at the quiet, often invisible labour of building a life elsewhere - and the importance of not letting stories, knowledge, and gestures get lost along the way.
Rather than offering simple answers, this conversation asks what kinds of care make it possible to hold complexity: to honour where we come from, while shaping who we are becoming.
Festival Brandhaarden
Location The Bookshop
Run time 60 minutes
Genre Perspective
Language English
Recipes for Change
This edition of CityTalks is part of Brandhaarden Festival 2026 and is inspired by Le Lasagne della Nonna, a performance by Massimo Furlan and Claire de Ribaupierre about memory, migration, queerness, and belonging. Le Lasagne della Nonna plays on 4 and 5 February at ITA.
historian & author
Mark Bergsma
Mark Bergsma is a historian and together with Agnes Cremers the founder of Van Gisteren, a studio for public history projects that makes history accessible, brings forgotten stories back into view, and works towards a more inclusive historical narrative. Mark is specialised in queer and women’s history. His recent work includes the projects Roze Reuzen and With Pride, and the book Verzetsvrouwen. Een onderbelichte geschiedenis History, co-written with Agnes and published in April last year.
© Keke Keukelaar
poet & cultural anthropologist
Jonathan Tjien Fooh
Jonathan Tjien Fooh is a Surinamese-born writer, poet, and cultural anthropologist. His work weaves together queer intimacy, ecological imagination, migration, and ancestral memory, while questioning dominant systems and exploring what connects us across differences. Remixing Dutch, Sranantongo, English, and Ngoko Jawa (informal Javanese), he creates layered, multilingual narratives that restory and breathe life into erased and forgotten (hi)stories.
chef, author & founder The Indigo Kitchen
Jason Tjon Affo
Jason Tjon Affo is a chef, cookbook author, and the creator of The Indigo Kitchen, where food, activism, and community meet. What began as a vegan reinterpretation of the Surinamese dishes he grew up with, has grown into a platform that treats the kitchen as a safe space - one where conversations about identity, decolonisation, queerness, and care are just as important as what’s on the plate.
moderator
Ewa Scheifes
Ewa Scheifes works at the intersection of visual art, societal issues, and public space. As a freelance curator and moderator, she collaborates with institutions such as the Van Eesteren Museum and the Creative Industries Fund NL. In her practice, art is a connecting force: between makers and audience, between city and society, and between urgent questions and new ways of imagining the future.
theatre maker & acto
Dilan Yurdakul
Dilan Yurdakul is a theatre maker, writer, and actor whose work explores migration, family, and the stories we inherit. Through both her artistic practice and her fellowship research at the University of Amsterdam, she reflects on identity, belonging, and what it means to grow into freedom. She is currently touring across the Netherlands with her performance De Stille Vrouw (The Silent Woman), which gives voice to first-generation migrant women, including her own grandmothers - alongside a companion podcast that continues these conversations.
