As we continue our monster mondays saga , a side quest has emerged ! From Hertjan’s passion to make black&white , collage posters of the movies that we are showing , A pre-film painting / drawing club has sprung to live ! Come by every monday from 19.30 to 20.00 to draw, drink & talk. 

Monday Monster Painting club

Sickhouse is presenting: Movie Monster Monday Mash

At Sickhouse we invent new programs every other day. Spontaneous talks at the bar can lead to a new initiatives that sometimes last for years. The Overkill Festival itself was invented when two members of our team got together, wanting to play retro videogames for a full weekend.

That’s how, after a few drinks, HertJan & Haaike came with the idea of the MonsterMovieMondays. And from now on, we watch a classic monster movie every Monday from 20.00 to 22.00.

We believe it’s important to look back at the classics and rediscover why these films have inspired many generations of filmmakers and, ultimately, let them to become cultural phenomena.

For our first edition, we showed the 1954 Gojira ( Godzilla ). The first one of about 30 films we’ll watch (many of them kind of crazy) dedicated to wild monsters.

Gozzilla is however, much less a monster movie and much more a depiction of the horrors following the atomic bomb. We fucked with nature, now nature is coming back to fucked with us. This is clear to everyone in the film. It's humanity’s fault: the constant testing of underwater bombs must have awoken the beast.

We don’t actually see the monster that often, and when it does show up, it looks kind of silly, but of course, we are scared of this gigantic fire-breathing dinosaur, who wouldn’t be? BUT perhaps people’s crazy idea to invent even more terrifying new means of mass destruction to deal with nature is far more scary than any monster and, as usual, it won’t solve the problem. Godzilla is still alive and kicking today, with an insane number of nuclear mutants to fight against… 

MonsterMashMondayMayhem

Cinema Obscura is our once a month filmprogram, curated in relation to our festival theme “Dream No Return”. With 10 + screenings over the year, we are looking how various filmmakers approached the notion of dreaming and its multiple possibilities to translate it to the screen.

Cinema Obscura is our once a month filmprogram, curated in relation to our festival theme “

. With 10 + screenings over the year, we are looking how various filmmakers approached the notion of dreaming and its multiple possibilities to translate it to the screen.

Cinema Obscura nights are meant to be moment where we watch movies together in an immersive set-up supported by a side program. Our intention is to stimulate reactions, discussions, ideas to reflect together on “

”. Participation is encouraged and new references or ideas for following screenings are also welcome. Don’t hesitate to share your dreams, your strangest film taste or your creative skills!

With our first Screening we showed the movie 

 from Jean-Pierre Jeunet et Marc Caro from 1995. In a dystopian future Dr. Krank, unable to dream himself, is kidnapping young children to steal their dreams. Angelo Badalamenti (also known for Twin Peaks) made the music of the film.  The film was released 4 years before The Matrix and we all felt there was strong  connections between the two world through the cyberpunk vibe, in the brain connectors designs and in the digital vision grafted onto the blind characters. 
More than the story, the strange atmosphere and the blurriness of the spaces, very close and very far at the same time, is what interested us most in relation to dream worlds.

Before the screening we hosted a crafting activity, asking the visitors to create their own “brain connectors”. These devices that we could wear during the projection, would connect our consciousness with one another. While in the cinema we joined our brain connectors and Marie hosted a small collective nightmare seance. The intention was to come together in an imagined world and let prompts guide us in the dark… If most of the time we dream alone, a point of attention this year for Sickhouse is looking into collective ways to navigate liminal world in dreaming states. After the 

 hosted by Jana Romanova, the exhibition “

” from Sondi in the corridor of the Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Cinema Obscura nights want to open the chapters of our nightmares…

Cinema Obscura wants to be a collective experience. It is not only about the screen, it is about the specific people with us in the room watching, reacting, feeling for the character of these world. After the film a part of the visitors shared their feeling connected with their device! 

We look forward to welcoming you to the next experience!

About Cinema Obscura "The City Of the Lost Children"

In 2025 Sickhouse will have a new location and we are commissioning our first alternative arcade! Dutch artists Vincent Schoutsen and Wouter van Veldhoven are joining forces with the French artists Leon Denise and Emilie Breslavetz from in.controlab, to develop and build a playful arcade machine.

In 2025 Sickhouse will have a new location and we are commissioning our first alternative arcade! 

Dutch artists Vincent Schoutsen and Wouter van Veldhoven are joining forces with French artists Leon Denise and Emilie Breslavetz from 

, to develop and build a playful arcade machine. Reflecting on the theme "Alternative control and Resistance" they are working together to create an arcade that will be playable at the new location of Sickhouse .

January and February are the months for creative brainstorms, starting with many ideas and getting inspired by their favorite objects. From buttons to plane cockpits, from sci-fi adventure to A.I relationships, the artists question the found objects they are working with, the role of the future player and the state of new technology in our society. 

In March, the 4 artists will be in Enschede for one week to bring everything together and build the arcade. They will present their process and progress during our monthly meet-up 

at BlackBrick.

The Arcade will be officially inaugurated in SFebruary, during the re-opening of Sickhouse in its new location! This project is a pilot edition and hopefully we will be able to commission several alternative arcades in the years to come.

Arcade Mayhem

The Global Game Jam took place from January 24 to 26. This year's theme was “Bubbles”. Sickhouse hosted a hub, and the result were six incredible bubbly games!

From January 24th to 26th, the Global Game Jam took place. The theme of this year was ‘Bubble’. So, all over the world, almost half a million game makers, programmers, designers, creatives and curious people came together to create, share and inspire each other in a very bubbly edition.

Sickhouse set up a venue for the jam to take place in Enschede in GrensFrequentie - a working place for musicians and entrepreneurs with spaces available for rent.  People from different cities and various backgrounds came together and created six staggering games!

Don't pop and don't stop! Bublo is a roguelite game about creating as many bubble gum bubbles as you can without popping them. The goal is to collect as many points as you can; the bigger the bubble, the more points you get. You can also get coins to buy upgrades, like extra strength for your bubble gum or blowing speed. This game was created in HTML.

This addictive brain-rot game is created to satisfy the urge to destroy freshly created (evil) bubbles with different shapes inside them. Inspired by the satisfaction of popping bubbles, whether plastic or soap. The sound is great! This game was made in HTML with the assistance of ChatGPT.

BUBBLE RAGE - by PAKO, YUXUAN, LUUKAS & PABLO

The biggest booming bubble battle! An arcade game for two players, one creates bubbles from a canister and the other chews and blows gum. Match the size of the bubble with the target, and win! This game is made in Godot Engine.

This augmented drinking game investigates why grocery prices have inflated into unaffordable price-bubbles. With a barcode scanner as your controller, this game is perfect for getting drunk while lamenting capitalism with your friends. Made in HTML.

A game of willpower; you play in bubbly world where you can try to resist popping the bubbles! This game was created in Bitsy Engine.

Space Bug is a platformer where you need to jump over various bubbles and reach the sun! It’s made in Game Builder Garage for Nintendo Switch.


You can play some of these games in the upcoming edition of COLLIDERS next Thursday, 

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Global Game Jam 2025 (RECAP)

Each year, the Sickhouse program is guided by a research theme. This year, we want to take a risk and accept the challenge of staying in bed, under the covers, with our heads buried in the pillows.

Return to Dreamland, From #CalmTok to Rest as Resistance

In 2025 following the progress of our reflection on play and activism, in the context of a hyper productive society, long conflicts, climate catastrophes, engulfing A.I, we want to take the risk, the counter intuitive move, the challenge to stay in bed, under the blanket, heads in the pillow. If new technologies infiltrate our beds to transform it into data to be mined, XR technologies, video games and virtual environments are also relevant media when delving into dreamworlds. This new edition wants to be another chapter of resistance where we self-organise to wander, dream, let our subconscious meet, invite our nightmares in...

The year program of Sickhouse and its main guest artists will be the leading process to develop the research and the selection for the festival.

* JANA ROMANOVA (https://janaromanova.com/)
“Shall these remain only dreams? we said. Shall we not bring these things into wakeful beings?” Ursula K. Le Guin in Changing planes : Social dreaming of the Frin.

Jana Romanova, LARP designer, is invited to design new playful experiences based on collective dreams, role-playing and dream-building experience that explores the boundaries between reality and imagination. At its core, the "DreamWalks" is about creating and inhabiting collective imaginary spaces—something akin to sharing a dream or a hallucination with others.

DreamWalk #1 : KristalBath - Sunday 9-03
DreamWalk #2 : Flying Field - Saturday 29-03
DreamWalk #3 : Walk in the ParQ - Thursday 24-04
DreamWalk #4 : to be announces

*SONDI (Link.tree)
“Wherever they stood it came, suddenly and simultaneously: refusal, refusal, refusal. And in a gust they collapsed into sleep.”
Sondi in Mbombo-Dream Echo.

In the second part of the year we are inviting Sondi to create an immersive set-up for her games “Mbombo-Dream Echo” and “Sleep On It”. The set-up/playground is meant to become a collective space for daydreaming, reinventing hybrid places of rest. Mbombo builds on years of research into the nature of rest and dreaming as radical forms of resistance against capital, colonial violence on the Black body. (concept formalised and put into embodied practice by Tricia Hersey in her Nap Ministry and her book Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto. New York: Little, Brown Spark, 2022.)

*JANNE SCHIMMEL (https://janneschimmel.com/)
“Our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way.” Jenny Odell in How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

In the third part of the year Sickhouse is inviting Janne Schimmel to dive into nightmare references and hack a game device to navigate them, in hybrid ways mixing sensorial experience and digital storytelling. Curious about the ambiguous space, nightmares create for fantasy and pleasure.

Exhausted, Burned out, anxious, overwhelmed are now recurrent adjectives we associate with our daily life and our work environments. Technology coming to save us is now selling us “digital rest points’, ‘CalmTok’,’ Raw-dogging a flight’ ‘Pokemon Sleep app’ to track our sleep and for the best ‘Sleep Tourism’ hotels with VR lucid dreams experiences...

Rest is resistance but it is under attack, our escape is already trapped. Beyond the idea of healthiness, The Overkill wants to look at rest as an act of refusal, a protest against efficiency, productivity, or even this monetised idea of a better version of ourselves.

Articles

Monday Monster Painting club

MonsterMashMondayMayhem

About Cinema Obscura "The City Of the Lost Children"

Arcade Mayhem

Global Game Jam 2025 (RECAP)

Theme 2025 : Return to Dreamland