Individual Project

Manifold contexts shape articulations around workshops, different workshop meanings, materializations, practices, and legacies. The 'workshop' – an ambiguous yet popular format for time-boxed collaboration is co-opted frequently, crossing boundaries between art and activism, between different disciplines and institutions, between commercial, educational contexts. The overuse as well as confusing use of the term 'workshop' and the it’s pervasiveness within this vast range of domains and practices raises the question, why and how are workshops valued and practiced? As a flexible format, the workshop seems to fulfill momentary needs and supposedly can be adapted to 'any' context, tackling 'any' issue. However, workshops, in their temporary, semi-committed and ad-hoc utterances, need to be considered also a consequence of uncertain times, contingent and fragmented work and social relations.

Drawing from the workshop-based practice of the Hackers & Designers collective this installation and workshop series pays critical attention to the workshop, more specifically we will focus on the relation of workshops, collective practice and self-publishing. It is part of a series of activities, which comprise a distributed, iterative publishing cycle and will materialize as an on and offline publication.

The installation (built with the fanfare display system) and workshop series are part of the artistic research project of Anja Groten at PhDArts, Academy for Creative and Performing Arts Leiden and the Making Matters project (http://making-matters.nl/).