Writing and Thinking Together about Affective Labour and Collectivity

Carla Cruz, Helena Reckitt and Karolina Majewska-Guede, on behalf of the And Others Network, will hold a workshop at the Lost and Found Symposium, Lisbon, Portugal, 6th and 7th December 2023

Lost and Found Symposium, Lisbon, 6th and 7th December 2023

This is the first of a three-part workshop (Lisbon, Warsaw, Riga) that focus on a series of exercises in historicizing collective artistic work. The Lisbon workshop focuses on recognizing and transforming visual patterns and  we will work with a selection of existing images of artistic collectives, analyze them together with the participants and develop new possibilities and performative paths of collective visibility.

The workshop will invite participants to talk, write, draw, perform and think together, as a way of creating a dossier of experiences which will help us understand the wide range of exclusions, omissions and othering involved in historization of collaborative and collective work. Our quest will be centred on exploring and inspiring others to think through the question: Can we imagine collective structures in art, which do not exclude, belittle or ignore affective and reproductive labour?

And Others editorial group at work

The And Others editorial group has been meeting since the start of 2023, beginning to shape the material gathered through collaborative Framapad writing sessions and public panels (soon available online) held in Autumn 2022. The collectively written texts, public discussions and the many voices of those who attended and contributed to the panels, are leading us through the discovery of what it means to write, edit and shape texts collectively.

And Others panel discussions open for booking

Building on two months of asynchronous collective writing, involving Ximena Alarcón-Díaz, Felicity Allen, Carla Cruz, Fabiola Fiocco, Karolina Majewska Guede, Lily Hall, Manual Labours, Kuda.org/Zoran Pantelić, Kirsten Lloyd, Chris McCormack, Gerrie van Noord, Helena Reckitt, Irene Revell, Marina Rosenfeld, Katja Praznik, Abhijan Toto and Jelena Vesić, we are excited to announce that the online public panels are now open for booking, starting with Panel One: Collectivity, Labour, Value and Social Reproduction on Monday 31 October 2022. The panellists in this and three panels to follow consider how we might write, think, read and practice together through other means.

‘And Others’ asynchronous conversations are underway.

‘And Others’ conversations started in late August 2022, with eighteen participants on board. The discussions are developing into rich, fascinating and somewhat unwieldy texts, across four separate panels. We are discussing four topics emerging from processes and practices of collective work and will soon be announcing the dates for public discussions in association with Art Monthly magazine.