Amsterdam's Melkweg Becomes Club Chrome for WorldPride

For two weeks this summer, Amsterdam’s Melkweg transforms into Club Chrome, a WorldPride destination where nightlife, contemporary art, cult cinema, comedy, drag, and club culture melt into one sparkling playground. Call it a queer universe, if you will, one where every room offers another reason to stay a little longer. 

As if we needed to tell you, queer nightlife is where identities are tried on, remixed, and reinvented, sometimes served with a 6-inch heel, where chosen families find each other, and where culture is created in real time. Club Chrome honours that legacy, bringing together the artists, communities, and movements that have shaped queer life long before rainbow branding became a corporate calendar event. For WorldPride 2026, Melkweg expands that spirit across every corner of the building, creating a space where music, art, performance, and community exist side by side. Below, our highlights from the programme, and how to win tickets for Violet Chachki!

Mykki Blanco
Mykki Blanco is one of the defining queer artists of the past decade. Their work continues to redefine what queer rap—and contemporary music more broadly—can sound like. What began as  a teenage girl posting vlogs and raps on social media evolved into a career that has challenged hip-hop’s traditional boundaries, blending noise, trap, club music, and performance art. while carving out a distinctly subversive path within a genre historically entangled with problematic ideologies such as misogyny, homophobia and transphobia.

Violet Chachki
Fashion people, assemble. Since winning RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 7, Violet Chachki has become the patron saint of impossible proportions and couture-level commitment. She’s basically the blueprint for high-fashion drag, moving between burlesque, couture, fetish aesthetics, and performance art. A muse for Prada and Moschino, Violet transforms every appearance into a living fashion editorial—corseted to the GODS, impossibly elegant, and just the right amount of dangerous. In other words: gorge.

Beautiful Creatures / The Sinful Son (Peter van der Wal)
One of Club Chrome’s visual highlights is Beautiful Creatures, a stunning exhibition by Amsterdam photographer The Sinful Son (Peter van der Wal). Armed with his iconic Polaroid Big Shot camera, Van der Wal spent years photographing beautifully unguarded club kids across Amsterdam, Berlin, and London. The portraits feel like an intimate archive preserving nightlife as a space where freedom could briefly exist before sunrise.

Melkweg Cinema: Death Becomes Her,
The film programme is dedicated to queer classics and cult favourites. Naturally, there’s Death Becomes Her, the gloriously camp ’90s black comedy that feels permanently preserved in the RuPaul’s Drag Race categories, explores immortality, betrayal, fabulous gowns, and enough dramatic energy to power an entire season of reality television.

Melkweg Cinema: Pink Flamingos
No queer cult cinema education would be complete without Pink Flamingos. John Waters’ legendary celebration of bad taste, rebellion, and absolute commitment follows Divine’s mission to remain “the dirtiest person alive”—a goal achieved with unmatched confidence. Together, the screenings offer a cinematic history lesson in queer joy, excess, and glorious bad behaviour.

Durand Bernarr
Durand Bernarr, whose unforgettable Glamcult TV performance already earned them a devoted following, brings their Grammy-winning blend of progressive R&B, theatrical vocals, and irresistible charisma. It’s soulful, playful, and impossible to categorise any other way than iconic.

Alok
The internationally celebrated comedian, poet, and activist brings Eat Pray Leave, a show that balances razor-sharp humour with reflections on identity, heartbreak, gender, and the absurd stories we invent just to make sense of modern life. Stand-up, spoken word, and social commentary all at once – comedy can be both devastatingly funny and surprisingly tender.

Club nights galore:
Nightlife continues to be one of the most important incubators for queer culture, so naturally the club programme is expansive. Pon Di Pride brings together dancehall and ballroom culture; Bixaria celebrates the explosive energy of Brazilian funk; Striptopia reframes strip culture as performance art, empowerment, and safe space; while PYXLS delivers hyperpop in all its euphoric, internet-raised glory. 

Pabllo Vittar
Last but not least, Brazilian superstar Pabllo Vittar brings Club Vittar to Amsterdam. With collaborations alongside Lady Gaga, Charli XCX, and Major Lazer—not to mention more than 35 million followers and the title of the world’s most-followed drag queen—Vittar has become one of pop’s most magnetic global figures. Her DJ-led Club Vittar concept, fresh from opening Lady Gaga’s record-breaking Copacabana concert for more than two million people, promises exactly what the name suggests: an enormous celebration where euphoric pop and communal joy take centre stage.