#Commonings: Workshops

12 noon–2 pm
The Gaza Valley Path
The Memory, Paths and Shifts/Transformations: Take Us to the Future
Workshop in the Main lobby, with registration
With Shareef Sarhan and Rana Batrawi
In Arabic and English

The workshop The Gaza Valley Path activates the installation by Rana Batrawi and Shareef Sarhan as a microcosm of the changes taking place in Palestine on the demographic, geographic, political and environmental level. The maps, photographs, videos, literary texts and other forms of multimedia assist in getting to know the valley in all its environmental, social and geographic aspects. Workshop participants will be invited to engage with the material gathered by the artists and discuss possible futures for the valley near Gaza together.

12 noon–3 pm
All We Have is Bits and Pieces: In the Absence of 'Common' Sense
Session in the Assembly, Hirschfeld Bar
With Esther Poppe, daphne brunet and Vinit Agarwal

This proposition is a proportional pondering. It will be a performative engagement. This proposition is a performative engagement into the archival turn. A re-constitution of colonial archives with a sensorium of smell, touch (fingers in album) and sound. This workshop de-configures the existing modalities of visual, categorical and narrative engagement with archival materials and open up the space for what is held within it. A sonic-choreographic encounter is proposed and set to an amplifier prior to the tone. In this sounding of testimonies, a score is produced during convivial moments. Here a sounding testimony is rewritten as an active score for communing. A loud land explosive, bomb, flaw, fraud, faint. The scene is a b-space. This b-body workshop puts the voice at its center and proposes to share practices that bull b-address bull doze the b-big voice as a b-blame political instrument.

12 noon–2.30 pm
Where are the Animals in Our Commoning(s)?
Reading Session in Conference room 1
With Ezgi Hamzaçebi and a welcome by Paz Guevara
In English

How can storytelling function as a commoning practice between humans and non-humans? In this workshop, participants will read and digest together Bilge Karasu’s two stories The Prey and In Praise of the Fearless Porcupine. The relation between “us” and “other” is rooted both in a physical reality like fragility, vulnerability and mortality, and people’s subjection to ever-existing language methods, materials and the appearance within this. This passivity and subjection are shared by human beings and non-human beings from the moment they begin communicating with the semiotic system, which blurs and destabilizes human’s relationship with oneself and the boundary between the human and the animal.

As part of this workshop, the installation Archive Inventory will activate a special section of Turkish feminist periodicals from the mid-1970s until today such as, Kadinlarin Sesi / Women’s voice (1975–1980), Sosyalist Feminist Kaktüs/Socialist Feminist Cactus (1988–90) and Feminist Politika/ Feminist Politics (2009–today).

12 noon–2 pm
Social Pedagogies
Workshop in Ostgarten, with registration
with EIGHT Collective: Kostas Tzimoulis and Vassilis Noulas

What forms, spaces and structures allow and encourage moments of collective study? Combining different spatial and discursive practices and methodologies, EIGHT collective invites participants to a workshop and discussion on how to common space.

During the opening day of Commonings and through a collective process, participants and the audience are invited to take part in the making of an artwork over the course of three days by setting out elements, materials and objects to question how they might be performed in the space and create fragments of notions. This incomplete artwork will be activated by discursive or performative readings and exchanges. Reflecting on what was created and how it / the participants interact with the space, the workshop will conclude by considering what spaces of commoning might look like and the effect of ephemeral spatial structures on ways of doing and being together.

2–5 pm
We Will Have Been
Workshop in the lecture hall
With Lorena Juan and Isabel de Sena
In English

How can futurity serve as a more-than-human commons? In this workshop, participants are invited to drift in and out of a queer-feminist SF storyboarding* session. Together, they will speculatively inhabit the future by imagining a narrator situated 200 years from now, in the year 2222, and sketch the world this narrator inhabits. The construction of each world will be based on a speculative historiographical account of what happened on planet Earth between now and then.

While the future is often subjected to speculation through “futurology” – which adopts extractivist logics by looking towards the future to control, colonize and shape it–, this project wants to inhabit it in order to reclaim it as a common resource. How can the affective impact of using such a resource through speculative (artistic) practices move beyond the widespread sense of cluelessness and lack of hope, and become a generative form of learning?

* Storyboarding is a narrative technique used in time-based media and especially film, using a combination of sketches and text.

3–5 pm
Open Language: Probing Hope and the Future
Workshop in Conference room 1
With Mohamed Al-Zaqzooq and Mahmoud Al-Shaer
In Arabic and English

Has modernity, globalization and its pace contributed to making language denser and more complex? How can language be understood anew as being at once the means and the end? How can language be a window to the future? This discussion on Open Language seeks to inquire about written forms of language. “Open language,” for the workshop conveners is the language of the individual and not the language of the group, as it is produced after the accumulation of feelings within the individual. And unlike the past, writers today need only to wait minutes to see the reverberation of their written material and behold readers’ reactions to it. The world is open, fast-paced and globalized; it is undergoing a great collective revelation, and thereby exploring the power of "open language” can aid in untangling questions of future and hope.

3–6 pm
Quilting Maps and Constellations Part 3
Workshop in the Conference room lobby
With Wangũi wa Kamonji, Nikolay Oleynikov and Alessandra Pomarico
In English

What are the joys and obstacles that arise when people engage in community? Inspired by traditions of collective quilting used to map symbols, constellations and directions towards freedom, this workshop is an invitation to engage in collective listening, witnessing and create emerging narratives of disconnection and interconnection.

During the five days of the Commonings program, a “tela,” an art piece on fabric, will be created resulting from a process of collaborative, multivocal and embodied inquiry. The process hopes to excavate what is ghosted or shadowed in oneself and to hold space to compost through conversations and embodied creativity, experimenting with shifts that may occur in the moment.

Participants are invited to bring a story to share of a time when working together to make the world more beautiful was met with obstacles. Everyone who is moved to do so can bring a piece of fabric that has a story or significance attached to it. During the workshop, these textiles can become part of the common (permanent) piece or added to a temporary altar installation where these fabrics can be taken to at the end.