about today

809Platform is a connective structure - a cultural foundation based in Amsterdam that moves deliberately between underground scenes, artist-led practices, and institutional contexts, holding the space between these worlds consciously and with care. It produces events, gatherings, residencies, and educational programmes that bring together artists and communities from different disciplines, backgrounds, and scenes - creating the conditions for practitioners to meet with intention, circulate knowledge across disciplines and scenes, and to build the relationships through which a creative field sustains itself over time.

The work of the Platform rests on a specific conviction: that the quality of connection between practitioners determines the quality of the field: how culture is made, how it moves, and how it survives. 809 is built around creating the conditions for that connection - through methodologies rooted in collective creative production and knowledge exchange, through formats designed to put people in situations where genuine creative relationships become possible, where the generative process is held with the same seriousness as what it produces. The outcome, over time, is a resilient creative community: practitioners who have access to each other's knowledge, resources, and networks because their relationships are rooted in a carefully curated process - one that moves from the people inside the making all the way to those who encounter what it becomes.

Since its first public programme in 2023, 809 has produced five volumes of 809event, developed 809session in now formal partnership with Expanded Contemporary Dance at ATD/AHK, and built an active community of over 200 practitioners, reaching 1,100+ participants. It is now formally incorporated as Stichting 809.

Where it came from matters as much as where it is going.

The question mark

809 is built around curiosity. The questions it starts with are not always answered by the end of a project. The unknown is structural, held deliberately. The platform tends its own identity with some looseness. It stands confident in what it is, genuinely curious about what it is becoming. Certainty forecloses. Genuine inquiry opens.

Process as the site of value

809 holds the conviction that value lives inside the process of making, not only in what gets made. The work that emerges from a genuine collective process - a room where no one knew exactly what would happen - carries something a well-executed plan cannot produce. Outcomes matter. The conditions under which they are reached matter equally.

Horizontal knowledge exchange

Knowledge moves laterally between people through practice and the experience of making something together. 809 believes in the intelligence that circulates through a cypher, a residency, or a shared creative process. That kind of knowledge transmission is as rigorous and as legitimate as any formal pedagogy. 809 builds conditions for it to happen, and treats it as the foundation of everything the Platform produces.

Care and reciprocity

Every person inside 809's processes, both on stage and off it, is essential to what is being made. 809 pays fairly when conditions allow, credits thoroughly, and is committed to taking care of the people inside its work as a condition of the work itself. Reciprocity is the foundation on which trust is built between the platform and its collaborators, between 809 and the communities it works with, and between the work and the people who encounter it.

The integrity of cultural lineage

The values, aesthetics, and social practices that come from underground culture - from the dancefloor, from the record crate, from the spaces that existed before they were recognised - are the source of 809's work. The commitment to collective production, to knowledge that moves laterally, to art that is lived together: all of this comes from a specific cultural lineage. 809 holds that lineage with care, carries it into every context it works in, and tends it against the pressures of institutionalisation and the demands of stereotypical legibility.

The in-between as a conviction

809 believes that the most generative cultural work happens in the space between established worlds; between underground and institution, between disciplines, between scenes. Belonging fully to any one context produces depth within it. Moving deliberately between them produces something else: contact across difference, knowledge that crosses boundaries, communities brought into relation that would otherwise remain parallel. 809 holds the in-between as a value, and builds from it.

809 began with two observations made inside the same institution — the Academy of Theatre and Dance in Amsterdam.

The first: students from different departments moved through the same building, were told their futures depended on their professional networks, and were given no space, no time, and no occasion to actually build them. The disconnect was structural, producing isolation where proximity should have produced community.

The second: students rooted in street and club style cultures — Hip-Hop, Break, Funk, House — were losing something when they entered the institution. The technical training provided was stripped of the cultural context that gave these practices their meaning: the community, the values, the transmission practices. The institution was never designed to provide them.

Both gaps were lived from the inside. In 2022, Mia Malenica responded with a clear instinct: build what's missing, together, with the community. In practice, this meant starting from what was already there. Students used their rights within the academy to book studios and equipment. Dance sessions were organised — spaces to cipher and engage with cultural practices the curriculum never offered. Pillows, plants, and decor rearranged to make institutional spaces feel like they belonged to the people inside them. Gradually, the whole eighth floor of the ATD building transformed into a venue, built from within using what was already available.

Each thread followed through became one of 809's two main programmes: the interdisciplinary gathering across departments became 809event; creating space for street and club style cultures within the academy on their own terms became 809session, now in formal partnership with Expanded Contemporary Dance at ATD/AHK. Two different projects, followed through from two different problems. But they were never really separate. They came from the same instinct, were carried by the same people, and asked the same underlying question: what does it take to build what's missing, together, from the inside? They were a platform.

Since its first public programme in 2023, 809 has produced five editions of 809event, built an active community of over 200 practitioners, and reached 1,100+ participants. It is now formally incorporated as Stichting 809, co-founded by Mia Malenica, Jana Matošić, Federica Lovato, and Gyuhyeong Yoo — the institutional expression of what was always true: this platform was built collectively.

What began as a grassroots student initiative inside a single institution is now positioning itself within the broader cultural field — producing public programmes, building partnerships, and developing a methodology that extends beyond the walls it started in.

This origin is the source of the methodology, the root of the values, and the reason the platform is constituted the way it is. Where 809 comes from is where it keeps returning to.

Management Board

Mia Malenica — Chair
Federica Lovato — Treasurer
Gyuhyeong Yoo — Secretary
Jana Matošić — Board Member

Supervisory Board — RvT

Maria Ines Villasmil Prieto
Lomroh Bras
Kim Tracy Tawjoeram