workshops
our multi-disciplinary workshop series is a monthly virtual gathering, designed to deepen your thinking-and-making process. inspired by our living room ethos, each session moves between seminar and reflective prompts.
for those seeking a regular meeting space to tend to their creative practice — in community.
we meet the last saturday of every month.
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the series
w.1.2 rituals of technology
date: february 28th at 18:00 CET | duration: 2.5 hours
how do we intentionally dialogue with technologies? this session will investigate historical chapters when technological inventions re-shaped artistic abilities and simultaneously raised ethical considerations. introducing reflective approaches for formalizing technological use within your creative practice, and how we may relate to machines with greater skill and attention to detail. what a typewriter is to poetry; what hand illustration is to animation; what 18mm is to filmmaking.
thinking-with: Robert Duncan, Hayao Miyazaki, Ana Vaz
w.1.3 research(ing) as curiosity
date: march 28th at 18:00 CET | duration: 2.5 hours
for intellectual wanderers interested in the art + spirit of research, where intuition, methodology, and practice intersect to create new pathways for thought-full storytelling. we will emphasize cross-disciplinary and multi-media strategies for creative and independent scholarly work, with a focus on citational politics as a restorative practice. how does research become a form of listening, activated through sensing, reading, and writing? how can research restore our forgotten/erased intellectual lineages?
thinking-with: Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, Sara Ahmed, Max Liboiron, errantry media lab
w.1.4 scaffolding-of-mind
date: april 25th at 18:00 CET | duration: 2.5 hours
scaffolding: “how cities are built, how buildings are constructed, and also how thoughts are organized. the materials that enable the building of things.” what are the materials/matters that enable your thinking? scaffolding-of-mind is an awareness tool that softens us towards a more relational act of reading + thinking. we will name how extractive culture operates through automated/assumed patterns of exchange, and open up the possibility for forming new pathways of creative dialogue with our intellectual ancestors, rooted in depth, detail, slowness, and attention.
thinking-with: James Baldwin
w.1.5 making living room
date: may 30th at 18:00 CET | duration: 2.5 hours
from the familiar to the abstract, the concept of “living room” has long traversed cultural and linguistic boundaries. inspired by poems from June Jordan’s 1985 book Living Room, we will consider the domestic sphere as a geo-political center for speculative possibilities. reflections on gendered associations; rhetorics to justify land grabs + settlements; aesthetic + social ideals. how does the domestic move within + beyond the home as a form of civic engagement?
thinking-with: June Jordan, Ruth Asawa, Tracey Emin, June Jordan, Mierle Laderman Ukeles
w.1.6 an ethic of sand
date: june 27th at 18:00 CET | duration: 2.5 hours
understanding sand is not dissimilar to the experience of trying to tightly hold it in our hands; the stronger our grasp and certainties about it, the more it slips through our fingers. sand is matter that challenges and erodes the social constructions and scaffolding with which design(ing) often manifests, and is predicated on. In this workshop, we will sit with the uncertainty + malleability that sand challenges us to think through, opening up questions about how to collaborate instead of “use” materials in a creative practice.
thinking-with: Ariella Azoulay, Stacy Alaimo, Robert Macfarlane, Donna Haraway, William Cronon
w.1.7 spiralism
date: july 25th at 18:00 CET | duration: 2.5 hours
Spirialism questions the order of things. the Haitian phenomena and literary movement emerged during the 1960s Duvalier regime, when political oppression and chaos re-invented writers’ conceptualizations of time, meaning, and relations. these ontologies + epistemologies challenge our assumptions around storytelling arcs– how history gets recorded, and how stories can open us to non-logical ways of knowing. we will situate this genre-agnostic movement within the contemporary political landscape, and engage in a Spiralist writing workshop together.
thinking-with: Frankétienne, René Philoctète, Jean-Claude Fignolé, Kaiama L. Glover
w.1.8 archipelagic thinking
date: August 29th at 18:00 CET | duration: 2.5 hours
the island is not isolated— it is always in creative exchange with other islands, which represent other cultures, languages, and ways of being. first conceived by Martinican writer Édouard Glissant, archipelagic thinking calls forth a Caribbean ontological impulse– to consider the scattered and diffracted nature of islands/sea in relation to each other. in this workshop, we will read sections from “The Black Beach”, a chapter from Glissant’s Poetics of Relations, where a singular sand-seascape inspires reflections on the fate(s) of Caribbean prosperity.
thinking-with: Édouard Glissant, Suzanne Césaire, Aimé Césaire, Wifredo Lam
w.1.9 co-authored workshop
date: september 26th at 18:00 CET | duration: 2.5 hours
to be announced—
w.1.10 co-authored workshop
date: october 31st at 18:00 CET | duration: 2.5 hours
to be announced—
w.1.11 co-authored workshop
date: november 28th at 18:00 CET | duration: 2.5 hours
to be announced—
w.1.12 co-authored workshop
date: december 19th at 18:00 CET | duration: 2.5 hours
to be announced—
our next workshop is: w.1.2 rituals of technology
saturday, february 28th at 18:00 CET | 12PM EST
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previous workshops
w.1.1 archival materialisms
date: january 31st at 18:00 CET | duration: 2.5 hours
discover how to deepen your creative practice through the material reading of archival research, a process that holds the ability to challenge our assumptions around knowledge and its production. focusing on archival literacy beyond the academic scope, we will introduce conceptual frameworks for approaching the future-past-present through material, memory, and media. how do we read archives with a heightened perception of their material being(s)?
thinking-with: Saidiya Hartman, June Jordan, Etel Adnan