ERRORS, HUMOUR AND ABSURDITY
As practices of embodied criticism
"A poetic act can provoke a moment of suspended meaning, a sensation of senselessness (…)
a break to a different perspective on things which might then have the potential to open up a political thought."
Francis Alÿs, 2021
This three-day workshop will question notions of disciplinarity in the creative fields of design, aiming to develop highly contextual and counterdisciplinary approaches grounded in direct action.
Participants will explore errors, humour, and absurdity as creative gestures of embodied criticism. Through a series of action-based exercises, we will decenter ourselves in order to reinvent our creative agency and refine our relationship with the "techno-bio-physical-social" environment (Braidotti, 2000).
Students will gain a broad set of perspectives on embodied criticism through case studies situated at the intersections of performative art, activism, and critical spatiotemporal interventions. Together, at the beginning of the workshop, we will select an everyday context that we all share, which will later serve as the site for a collective action. Within this shared framework, students will be invited to conceive, enact and implement a series of gestures of embodied criticism through the lenses of error, humour, and absurdity.
By embracing collective joy as a practice of resistance, the workshop will explore how absurdity can open possibilities beyond normative, linear conceptions of time and history, while error can function as a rupture that generates new temporalities and modes of engagement.
Schedule
Day 01: Discern and Situate (10-17h)
––Act 00: Initiate. Introduction to the notion of direct action. Phenomenology. Study Cases.
––Act01: Discern. Position yourself. Write a critical statement.
––Act 02. Situate. Find a context. Detect an opportunity. Study it.
Day 02: Imagine (10-17h)
––Act 03. Imagine. Proliferate a series of alternative presents. Conceive action strategies.
––Act 04-1. Activate. Rehearse and test first action prototypes.
Day 03: Transform (10-14h)
––Act 04-2. Activate. Implement and embody. Activate a context. Document it.
Outputs:
––A collective process-based canvas: a big-scale collective pasteboard (e.g. 2 x4m) space of research and collective ideas proliferation. Possibly exhibitable artwork.
––An audiovisual (or a series of audiovisual essays) based on the implementation of the direct action. Short videos + photographic archive.
––A collective direct action.
