On the evening of July 30th, The Willet-Holthuysen House - Amsterdam Museum's 17th-century canal house - became the stage for Center of Attention: Pleasure, a night of queer pleasure curated by yours truly with exhibition design by Kikimara Studio. For one night, centuries of Dutch domesticity met contemporary queer culture: workshops, performances, sound, and conversation turned the house's historic rooms into a living exploration of pleasure as resistance, connection, and joy.
Each room told a different story. The kitchen read desire into still-life symbolism; the Salon reimagined the Victorian calling card through the language of fetish and consent; the Antique Room traced pleasure's fine line with peril through colonial-era collecting; the Blue Room housed queer zines and erotica wrapped in latex; the Garden Room turned voyeurism into performance; the Dining Room staged a feast fit for gods and brothel patrons alike; and the Bedroom centered a reinterpreted early-20th-century "pleasure chair." Upstairs, the new installation Titology: Prodigal Shelter reimagined the breast as architecture — soft, suspended, and structurally assertive.
Between a latex workshop, a cruising-culture workshop (we made our very own miniature plaskrullen (urinals), a pleasure-and-consent workshop hosted by Mail & Female, a panel on queer pleasure in the city, and a sound archive of cruising stories, the house stopped being a static museum setting and became a participant — a witness to Amsterdam's long, evolving relationship with intimacy, play, and desire.
