Opening Refugee Welcome Week 2026

This year, Refugee Welcome Week NL is guided by the theme Radical Hope & Courage.

Radical hope is not naive optimism, but an empowering practice. It asks us to face reality honestly, even when it is painful, while still believing that change is possible and worth working for. This opening evening of Refugee Welcome Week 2026 creates space for the truths that are too often blurred, avoided, or polished for others. Refugee status tells us where someone has been, not who they are. Facing this truth is where the possibilities begin. This evening is not about refugees. It is an evening by refugees, inspiring creators of their own destiny in a new cultural space.

The evening begins with a community dinner at 18:00. For €25,50, you are welcome to join the table for the community dinner in the Grote Zaal. Just like last year, you can buy a Solidarity Ticket along with your own, to invite a refugee to eat with you. Refugee Welcome Week will make sure someone receives the donated ticket.

After we connect and dine together, we will officially kick off this week with a coalition panel with the organisers and partners. From 20:00 onwards, artists and storytellers take the floor across three breakout spaces, inviting the audience to poetic, theatrical, zine-making and co-creation experiences. Throughout the evening, a curated visual art exhibition reminds us that displacement is not an identity. It is a circumstance.

If you only wish to join the programme from 20:00, please select a free ticket.

Transportation support is available for people living in AZCs or shelters outside of Amsterdam. Feel free to reach out to us at program@refugeewelcomeweek.nl.

Joined by Sajad Salmanpour Founder of Queer Work, author & community builder Elena Ponzoni Researcher at Sociology and coordinator of the Refugee Academy (VU) Anas Younes Theatre practitioner, cultural researcher & curator Naya Aljoudi Spoken word artist, author and decolonial researcher Mohammed Badran

About Refugee Welcome Week NL 2026

Refugee Welcome Week NL 2026 is a refugee-led programme bringing together 30–40 young refugees and newcomers across four Dutch cities. Over two weeks, participants take the lead as performers, curators, hosts, producers and storytellers, creating spaces of connection through art, discussion, film, music, food and community action. Refugee Welcome Week NL is part of the wider international Refugee Week movement and is organised in close partnership with Refugee Week UK. Explore the full programme at refugeewelcomeweek.nl.

Time table 17:00 - 22:00 Meetingroom | Exhibiton

More info about the exhibtion and participating artists will soon be announced.

18:00 - 20:00 Grote Zaal | Community dinner & kick-off

More info about the panel and participating speakers will be announced soon.

20:15 - 21:15 Workspace | Truth, Resistance & Refugee Voices

As refugees we are often seen primarily as recipients of help, but many of us are dedicated to activism and human right protection in our destination country. What does it mean to dedicate a life of displacement to protect human rights in a new country? How can our own experience of exile help us to raise awareness about human right dismantlement happening in current times? And do we build resistance to stigma and far-right propaganda by sharing different perspectives and narratives ?

In this session we will listen to experiences of human right activists with refugee backgrounds operating in different contexts (Netherlands and South Africa) and reflect together through co-creative exercises to understand what their experience teaches us about today’s theme: What truth do we need to face to stop repeating harm?

20:15 - 21:15 Expo | A Letter Full of Love to an Non-Person: On queer storytelling & refugee narratives

This programme presents A Letter Full of Love to a Non-Person, a collective book project created through community writing workshops with LGBTQI+ refugees. Participants are invited to create a small zine using words, drawings, or fragments. This hands-on activity explores storytelling in an accessible and creative way.

20:30 - 21:30 Studio | On Anger and Fatigue

On Anger and Fatigue is an artistic research and lecture-performance that investigates the relationship between truth-telling, exhaustion, and resistance within the contemporary European Art worlds. The work merges the aesthetics of the performative lecture with the oral tradition of storytelling, creating a hybrid form that oscillates between academic critique and poetic confession.

About the contributors

Sajad Salmanpour is an author, community builder, and the founder of Queer Work, a platform dedicated to supporting LGBTQI+ refugees in the Netherlands. His work is rooted in the belief that storytelling is a powerful act of presence a way to reclaim voice, identity, and belonging in the face of displacement. He is the initiator of the collective book project A Letter Full of Love to an Unknown Person. As an author, Sajad is interested in the intersection of memory, migration, and identity. He sees writing not only as expression, but as a form of connection between past and present, between individuals and communities, and between silence and visibility.

Alongside his creative work, he actively builds collaborations with organizations, cultural spaces, and networks across the Netherlands, contributing to initiatives such as Refugee Welcome Week. His approach bridges storytelling with social impact, creating moments where voices are not only heard, but held and recognized. At the heart of his work is a quiet but powerful intention: to create space where people can exist fully, and where their stories can live beyond them.

Elena Ponzoni is an academic researcher working from the principle of Radical Hope, which involves humility and recognition of the lessons, knowledges, and practices of communities that experience injustice. It involves learning from the ability of those who, despite oppression and structures of impossibility, find the capacity to act, care, love and challenge power.

Refugee Academy, initiated together with professor Halleh Ghorashi, has the goal of centring refugee knowledges in research and society. Now part of the Co-creation for Inclusive Knowledges Lab, Refugee Academy follows the principle of Radical Hope by creating small acts of resistance to transform academic institutions, and challenge both colonial heritages and hierarchies engrained in how we create (academic) knowledge. It means working with people with lived experiences and collective wisdom that are currently marginalised, having the courage to address power differentials, and intertwine our work, perspective and lives.

Anas Younes is a theatre practitioner, cultural researcher, and curator working across Syria and the Netherlands. His practice connects performance, participatory theatre, cultural policy, and public programming, with a focus on how art can create spaces for dialogue, collective reflection, and social imagination in contexts shaped by conflict, displacement, and migration. He has collaborated with cultural institutions, municipalities, festivals, and grassroots initiatives across Europe and the Arab region as a facilitator, lecturer, curator, and artistic programmer. In the Netherlands, he has worked with organizations such as SPOT Groningen, Vrijdag, municipalities, and newcomer centers, using theatre as a tool for participation, inclusion, and intercultural exchange.

Anas also curated public programs for Mena is Here Festival and contributed to Diwan Arts and Culture Festival in Switzerland. He is the director of Culture Tank Factory, a Syrian think-and-do tank focused on cultural rights, civic imagination, and participatory approaches to public policy. Through this work, he develops research labs, policy discussions, and community-based initiatives linking artistic practice with justice, governance, and collective futures.

Naya Aljoudi is a Syrian artist, whose poetry is a tool to combat the systemic erasure that writes many intersectional identities out of their own biographies. Their work moves through war, exile, and trauma, while returning to love and care, practices of both survival and defiance, and collective becoming. On stage, Naya offers performances that invite audiences to question language as a technology of resistance against censorship and harm, and whether it can serve as a tool for collective liberation.

Mohammed Badran is a Palestinian-Syrian social designer, anthropologist, and community organizer based in Amsterdam. He is the co-founder of Syrian Volunteers Netherlands , where he develops initiatives that connect diaspora expertise, refugee-led advocacy, and cultural programming.