An office is a project that seeks to build a transnational network of practices fomenting collaboration and cooperation between several artists, cultural workers and the Jakarta based collective Gudskul. By subverting and appropriating the elaborate capitalist strategies of offices, be they federal or corporate, we are developing an adaptive hybrid platform (presential/online, activism/art) to form long-term relations. Operating within diverse urban and rural spaces, contexts, and histories, and between the Global North and South, will allow us to address social and ecological urgencies by getting involved locally and sustainably, avoiding short time interactions that so often end up being exploitative in nature. The project will unfold via office “Departments” that engage in the co-facilitation of workshops, a “Teambuilding Festival”, a publication, and an exhibition. We are invited by ruangrupa and Gudskul ecosystem in Jakarta to further develop these exchanges as a space for collaborations between activists and cultural practitioners across borders and differences.
We as a group
We are a diverse group of artists, writers, curators, designers, and other creatives and cultural workers coming from different places in the world, including Austria, Azerbaijan, Costa Rica, Croatia, Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Indonesia, Italy, Malta, Mexico, Netherlands, Poland, Romania, and Russia. As an interdisciplinary and international artistic and curatorial group, we are gathered around our shared interest in collaboration and practices that allow for differences within them. Our first encounter happened in the International Summer Academy Salzburg (2021) at the course “Becoming Lumbung’’ hosted by the Indonesian art collective ruangrupa. At the end of the course we were invited to Gudskul in the spring of 2022, and since then, we have kept in touch through bi-weekly online meetings. What holds us together is our different interlaced needs of learning, making, sharing, listening, and developing further our varied practices, as well as our affective entanglements with each other and our collaborators/audiences. We are a group that is individually and collectively researching ways to connect and to bridge differences, continuing to grow from the ideas and practices of the community accumulation system of lumbung that we have learned about during our time in Salzburg with ruangrupa. In facing various challenges of finding ways to collaborate, to work together as a group, we were inspired by the work The Office of Inner Emigration by Sophie Stadler, one of the group members, and decided to take the concept of “office” as an overarching structure for our upcoming residency at Gudskul in Jakarta, Indonesia. Gudskul is an ecosystem of collective practices and an art school initiated by ruangrupa. It holds a very important trajectory with a vast experience in radical forms of pedagogy and collective practices. These have allowed them to develop exciting artistic tools and a unique learning environment from their specific interrelations. As a group, we are interested in developing a long-term relationship and to learn/participate in the Gudskul ecosystem. More specifically, we are interested in developing an exchange with collectives such as Serrum, focused on research in art pedagogy, Grafis Huru Hara, a collective dedicated to exploring
Bibliography
We keep collecting books and texts which reflect upon topics that are shared among us, such as collective organization as well as collaborative artistic production. You can find what we have gathered so far below, and we are happy to extend the list with your recommendations.
Media Reports about an office
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