Stroom Library sessions: Katerina Sidorova

Date: 7 October 2025
Location: Stroom Den Haag, Hogewal 1-9, Den Haag

Participants: Yannis Androulakis, Sonya Usmanskaya, Anna Andrejew, Marjolein Ossewaarde 
Unfortunately not able to join: Maja Bekan, Remco Osorio Lobato, Eliane Bots, Thomas Castro  

On October 7, Katerina Sidorova was our guest speaker. An important part of her research concerns the intertwining of architecture and power, or as she herself wrote in her invitation to the participants: "Together I would like to focus on/unwrap/look into how architecture and city planning function as instruments of power and how they can also serve as frameworks of resistance. Drawing from a range of readings: from state monuments and military fortifications to protest architecture and roundabout revolutions—we will discuss how spatial design shapes hierarchies, enforces control, and mediates access." 

The subject ties in with our See You in The Hague program and is therefore well represented in our library. That is why not only books from Katerina’s own collection, including Embodied Activism and Rights of Way, were discussed,  but also a wide selection from Stroom Library, such as Protest Architecture, Rebel Cities by David Harvey, and her own books, including Martyrdom, Body, State, Manifesting, Power and The Game of Knives. Prior to the session, Katerina created a zine with passages from thinkers that texts that are important to her, like Foucault’s thoughts introduction of the term biopower, Hobbes’ Leviathan and Asef Bayat who in his book on the Arab spring, Revolution without Revolutionaries, writes about how traffic roundabouts, intended by states as functional infrastructures, became stages of dissent. (Funny detail: with assigning the Malieveld in The Hague as an approved place for demonstrations, the state has arranged to give people the chance to speak up, whilst being unnoticed and causing no rupture whatsoever in the city). 

All this material serves as the basis for a lively discussion in which many ideas and suggestions for new books, writers and artist(group)s are exchanged. Together with Katerina, the participants, all being actively researching and working in this field of interest, quickly decide to plan another session to create a second version of the zine, which will also incorporate their input.