Individual Project

In this installation and workshop series, Anja Groten (Hackers & Designers) opens up her practice-based research with a special attention to the ‘workshop’ as a format for self-organized learning and publishing.

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 and educational contexts. As a flexible format, the workshop seems to fulfil momentary needs and supposedly can be adapted to ‘any’ context, tackling ‘any’ issue. However, the workshop, in its temporary, semi-committed, ad-hoc utterances, needs to be considered also as 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 focuses on the relation of workshops, collective practices and self-publishing, posing the question how collective practices can negotiate their socio-material conditions in critical, creative and conscious ways, and develop subtle but effective tactics to ‘stay in touch’ with each other and with the different environments they interact with.

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. It is the first of a series of activities – a distributed, iterative publishing cycle that will materialize as an on and offline publication.