What happens when you give space to what can be possible?

ADM always felt like a place where the rules bent just enough to let life in. I learned how community can feel like a conversation that never ends, how it doesn’t take perfect conditions but patience to see what emerges when people have the space to try, to fail, and to try again.

I spent time here, photographing the people who turned an abandoned shipyard into a living experiment. I listened as they spoke about art, resistance, and the quiet rebellion of creating without a blueprint.

These stories invite you to see what happens when rules are unwritten and possibilities are endless. They are a reminder that anything can happen when you make room for it.

  • I am here for 20 years already, I was here since the beginning.

    Today we are around 120 residents here, we have all kind of people here from young anarchists to families with children. 

    There's one guy who builds everything out of scraps, he tears down everything he finds and arrange them into piles. Another one makes machines who uses special frequencies to repair energies, it has a radius of over 1000 kilometers. 

    There's a new generation here of younger people who come and want to make a change, I think it's time for a new chapter in my life, maybe find a new place with my own land so I can focus on my projects. 

    I came here at 1998, we were around 20 artists who squatted the place. 

    In April the mafia came and tried to evict us, they came with heavy machinery and took a piece of the building here, they wanted to scare us away from here, the first months were a bit scary there was even gun shots sometimes. 

    I decided to put this place on the political agenda, and retaliated with a cultural attack, at August 1998 I started the first Robodock.

    A multidisciplinary, contemporary art festival at the huge, rough, industrial warehouse of the former NDSM shipyard.

    We invited artists from Europe and North America for a four days event, to give all kind of performances - fire shows, industrial installations and multimedia performances. 

    Everyone came to Robock, from Larry Harvey and Marion Goodwill the founders of Burning Man and most of the artist who presented there participated here as well. 

    We built giant metal art installation, have huge fire shows and theater acts, this was a radical adult playground. 

    For years the festival grew bigger and bigger until we had to have a whole organization around it, and eventually even take it outside of ADM because it was too big. 

    A few years ago I decided I don't want t

  • I came here for the first Robodock, there was no trees, nothing around. 

    I arrived to a party and thought to myself, what the fuck are these people doing here. 

    I was living in italy at the time, and made art with some people, from there I moved to amsterdam and at some point lost my house. The ADM people told me I can sleep here for a few days and here we are 9 years later. 


    Here I discovered freedom, the freedom to express yourself in any way you'd like too. This is so precious.

    Everywhere you look there is a piece of art, it's a huge playground. 

    It's never too late to have a happy youth, and here everyone can have a happy youth until the end. The dials of the clock don't stick in your ass, when you come inside here time have a different perception, there is no real time. It doesn't matter what the time is., you can always work on something and make noise. You can express yourself whenever its necessary.  

    Time is something that in the rest of society are really fucked up by. And that's is what is so beautiful here, it's not like that. 


    Everybody takes upon their own role, it's more organic. There's people who like to take administrative stuff, there's once who like to talk to the press, some like gardening and some like driving big bulldozers around and move big pieces of metal around. 


    This bus is the first car that I bought to myself, I wanted something that I could put my stuff in. 

    Thanks to this bus I drived twice to the balkans, making an expedition to cook for refugees and people in need. This bus is important to me as a tool. Apart that it is my house on the road, it is a huge kitchen that can cook for 15,000 people a day.

    I’m doing this because I can. I’m not that proud of europe these days. I grew up in a free europe where everything was fantastic and peaceful, but this is not the reality in the borders today. 

    I feel that my work affect the opinion of people about these unfortunate people who needed to flee from their houses. Now that they see what we do they no longer think that they are all terrorists. 

    When we were working there, with the kitchen bus we would wake up every day and start chopping vegetables until we drop. You try to cook something different everyday, you try to manage the people around you, and hope to get enough money to keep doing it. 


    It's the weirdest thing because ADM is all about unstructured, and its fantastic, it grows organically. And then what we do there is totaly different. A bunch of anarchist punks who manage a group of 15,000 refugees, and doing that every day needs a lot of structure, were still not sure how we did it. 


    Part of the structure that the NGOs bring to the camp is fences for crowd control, you have to stand in line for raincoats, food and medical help. There’s always fights in these lines and at some point they asked us to make the food for the whole camp, and they wanted us to put fences up. We said no way, fuck that. We don’t want any fences, were never going to put any fences. 

    They said that were mental, they're going to attack you. They see soup and their going to attack you. We said don’t worry, we have a special tool, we have a Boombox. With the music preparing the food was easy, 7000 people in line, no worries, no fight, no nothing! 

    All the other NGO’s had fights in their line, we didn’t have one. 

    Which is not allowed will always be possible. We will not go down with our heads down, we will create. The unfortunate part about the ADM eviction, is that it takes time to build up a beautiful thing like this, and to make it work. It's 20 years now that we live here, so we have something going, but no way, no fucking way that if they take this place down our life will change. We continue to do what we do, again. What is not allowed is always possible! 


  • People know me as Daan, I came here a bit more than 11 years ago to the ADM terrain because I was playing music with some people who lived here. 

    We were playing in a band and we were quite active in squat places to create culture over there. 

    We were evicted from our own squat and one of the guys invited us to stay here for a while. 

    Getting here was a very interesting growing experience, to have to figure out that my definition of free spaces was not other people’s definition for that. 

    When I arrived here I was super young and naive about certain things and I couldn’t see the amount of work that was put here until the moment I got here… I was like the young dog that needed to learn about this place. One of the things that I have really learned was to let go of past conceptions about how to do things in a group. I wanted to plan things ahead and come up with projects for the whole group, but this wasn’t Necessarily what was welcome here. This is a very unique space where the individual has a lot of freedom. This community does not have a core set of guidelines set in stone. A lot of living communities have a mission statement but this community did not have a mission statement, it was all implicit.

    The best example is there are two main roles in the community, everyone pays for utility bills and if you have a guest, they can stay here up to one month. And if he wants to stay more than one month he needs to ask the community to stay longer. I think that these two basic rules make so the community is not being abused by the individual. And this is enough, we don’t want more roles.

    I think this is a playground where people get to experience how to respect other people’s freedom and also stand up for yourself. What I’ve experienced here is once you are willing to push forward to show initiative people are willing to help out and give you tips, they will not necessarily physically help you but they encourage you to do it so you don’t end up as consumers of each others’ services. You just share the skills and share the knowledge.

    During this period of time, I learned that we are living here in a situation where the group doesn't necessarily control the individual and the individual does not rule the group. This makes me believe that we live in a community that grew to be a tribe.

    What I really like the people will be inspired by the fact that it is not that complicated to come up with interesting projects. You can come up with amazingly fun and creative things because you're not trying to sell it but to share it with the world. And this is such a different feeling when you create things. I wish that people could come and experience the ADM and different spaces around the city and even the world. When people can come and find a place for their talent, maybe their talent doesn't have a big economical side, but it does have a value!

    The ADM has 21 years of experience in organized anarchy, but anarchy is a word that got a really negative connotation because people got used to associating chaos with the word anarchy. But this is not its meaning, anarchy is letting things organize in a natural kind of way. This is very interesting to get to experience this approach and I would love to share this experience with the world.



  • My name is Ayla and I came to ADM in January 2008 because I was on a search for a place to live. I was here at a christmas party and someone asked me if I had a place to live and I said I’m searching for a new place, so he invited me to come to the ADM. With my bike, a blanket and a toothbrush, I arrived here in the middle of a windy night, at the moment I stepped through that i gate I knew I was home. 


    I started introducing myself to everyone I met on the road, I stepped into the kitchen and saw a woman working in the restaurant kitchen and I suggested to give her a hand and she was surprised by my offer but gave me a chance and I became her kitchen assistant. 


    I also connected really well with a stain-glass artist and she allowed me to be her assistant. She taught me all the basics and at the moment I had enough money I bought the tools and started making stuff myself. 


    As humans we have a tendency to look at stuff in a fragmented way, in much details but not connected to other fragments that are just as present. How I see ADM is like permaculture with people because the rule here basically is you can live where all your neighbors agree. So just like a garden when you let plants decide where they want to grow rather than making this decision for them, it works very well with humans too, because neighbors look after each other. There’s a big social safety net here because we choose who we want to live next to. 


    I've lived here in total 5 years, there were a lot of lessons I’ve learned here… but if anything I think I managed to overcome my fears, not only of spiders, who used to be an issue, they’re friends now… but that went together with my fear of failure, I've learned that experiments can lead you to unknown paths that can be more beautiful than a pre-plan designed. I lost my fear of the experiment and the failure it might represent. 


    Everyone who comes here learns something else, but it’s always from the way of possibilities. 


    That is what makes us so strong, the tendency to look at the options and possibilities in a very non-restrictive way and to have that open mind towards things creates a space that vibrates this. People who come here at a festival, they get inspired, they see the options and possibilities and take that back home with them.


  • My name is Achmed, I am from Syria, I was living in Damascus and I wanted to go out because of the war. As a Kurdish we were attacked by Daesh and I couldn’t stay there. I was in the refugee camp in the winter.
    One night I was in my tent with my sister and it was raining, mud everywhere. Suddenly I hear this music, crazy music, I went out of my tent and saw this crazy man with a boombox, I followed him and suddenly met this new kind of people, a new culture I didn’t know.
    I saw people helping us as refugees, they didn’t care where we come from, they saw people that need their help, needs food.
    They served “shorba” soup, it was the only hot food in the camp, and in winter it was the most important thing. Even if you were not hungry you'll drink it to feel some warmth in your body.
    So I went there and started talking to people, back then I couldn’t really talk English, just a few words, but they were nice to me and taught me the language.
    Slowly I started to see the world through their eyes and ideas. I wanted to be with them and began helping them out, serving shorba with music. In this situation when everything is bad it was a small happiness, a small light in a dark place. We spent 3 months together and when the summer came I relocated to a different camp in Spain, we were there for 9 months in really bad conditions. It felt like being back in Syria, they controlled us in every aspect and we didn’t have our freedom, they took our money and my passport but eventually I managed to get my papers back and left for Holland.
    Coming here to ADM feels like being back home, I’m discovering myself, it feels like I’m learning about a new world. People care about each other, they are nice to each other and for me it's a new kind of life, people except me because they like me. I’m just a person to them and it makes me happy.