Creative Writing Workshop: On Making Inventory
with Marta Pagliuca Pelacani x Simulacrum Magazine | A Printed Matters event
- Date
- 17 February 2026
- Time
- 16:00 -18:30
- Location
- BG 3
- Room
- VOX-POP
On Making Inventory: Writing, Finding and Bone-Counting is a creative-writing workshop aimed at those struggling to find the words to write. Grounded in the work of Antonio Gramsci, Julietta Singh, Lola Olufemi and Ursula K. LeGuin, the workshop will invite a reflection on belonging as a praxis of positioning and creative storytelling.
Participants will be guided through the practice of "making-inventory": finding in our bodies the traces of those histories and stories that are ours to tell, but which might need new worlds and listening ears to receive them.
Over three hours we will practice creative writing as a liberatory practice through exercises that invite conversation between us and our inner critics. The afternoon will close with an optional, anonymous reading circle for sharing work and receiving feedback.
Do I need to prepare?
- There will be writing materials and a possibility to print, but you are welcome to bring your tools of choice, especially if you enjoy typing from a laptop.
- The workshop invites introspection and tender reflection. Come ready to gently scavenge the depths and willing to offer yourself some well-deserved aftercare.
How does the reading circle work?
The reading circle works anonymously and randomly — participation is optional.
Participants who wish to take part will place a text (maximum two A4 pages) in a box. Texts are then picked at random and read aloud by someone else.
Feedback is offered by anyone who feels they have something generous to contribute, always trying to imagine themselves as the right interlocutor for the work being read.
You’re encouraged to share something written during the workshop, but submissions written elsewhere are also welcome, as long as the length is respected. Texts exceeding the maximum length may be read in excerpt to ensure everyone has a chance to be heard.
Practical information
This programme will take place at VOX-POP, ground floor (Binnengasthuisstraat 9). The workshop is free and open to all, but we do kindly ask you to register in advance.
Workshop host
Marta Pagliuca Pelacani is an educator, writer and storyteller exploring land, memory, and inheritance through practice-based research. Informed by peasant cosmologies, feminist epistemologies, and memory activism, her work traces the afterlives of mezzadria — Italian sharecropping — into the present. She holds a diploma in Storytelling and Performing Arts (Scuola Holden, 2017) and is a PhD candidate in Italian Studies at University College Cork (Ireland). Her writing has been published in Robida (2025), Simulacrum Magazine (2022), and Comunicazioni Sociali (2021). She is co-author of Decolonizing the Museum: Art, Activism, and the Question of Race (Routledge, 2025) and a member of artists’ association Kostgewonnen (NL).
About Printed Matters
Printed Matters: The Politics and Aesthetics of Independent Publications invites you to experience independent publishing as both an intimate and political practice. Bringing together books, zines, magazines, and other self-published experiments, the exhibition explores how printed matter can function as a site of resistance, experimentation, and alternative knowledge production where aesthetics are inseparable from politics.
Throughout its duration, the exhibition remains active through workshops on printmaking, editing, and publishing, transforming the space into a living learning environment: part exhibition, part fair, part communal gathering.
Exhibition curator
Zoi Psimmenou is an interdisciplinary researcher, curator, and exhibition designer with a background in architecture and a MA in Museum Studies from the University of Amsterdam. Rooted in decolonial thinking, critical museology and participatory approaches, her work explores how exhibition making, curatorial practice, and public programming can unsettle authoritative power structures and foster critical, socially engaged exhibition experiences. She continues this inquiry through the public programme Spatial Encounters and the exhibition Printed Matters as Resident Programme Curator at VOX-POP.
