Materials
Join us at Pelican House in London for a day focused on visual culture as a catalyst for transformative social change.
Through discussions and workshops we’ll explore how cultural workers and organisers work together to imagine alternative futures and build infrastructures of support and resistance.
Talks and discussions
What We’ve Learned from Running a Migrant-Led Design Agency
Migrants In Culture
We’ve learnt so much designing for social movements over the last two years and we’d like to share our insights with you. Expect juicy glimpses behind the scene from Rosalie Schweiker and Zara Shasore.
What are Migrants In Culture’s Visual Notes telling us about our Movement for Border Abolition?
A discussion between our designer Javie Huxley and organiser Francesca Humi about our most recent visual notes, chaired by Joon Lynn Goh. We’ll use visual notes to find out about connections between different organisers and see common threads.
Towards A People’s Design Service
Unit 38, Sahra Hersi and RESOLVE
We will reflect on projects we’ve worked on and share some ideas on how collaborative and participatory architectural and spatial practices can challenge existing tendencies within the built environment — and strengthen the power communities have to shape their own neighbourhoods.
Solidarity with Palestine
Cultural Workers Against Genocide, Parents for Palestine and Baesianz
What can cultural workers do to fight the complicity of our institutions in the ongoing genocide? How can we build solidarity, material support and creative forms of resistance? A discussion between Cultural Workers Against Genocide, Parents for Palestine and Baesianz on cultural work and the urgent struggle for Palestinian liberation.
The ABC of the Projectariat
Kuba Szreder
Freelance creatives traverse the global art world, where enthusiasm and exclusion, mobility and precarity, entrepreneurialism and anxiety come hand in hand. In this performative lecture, Kuba Szreder will delve into the ups and downs of the artistic projectariat via a random selection of snippets from his book The ABC of the Projectariat.
Let us Introduce You Into the Future…
ACFM
The ACFM crew will lead you on a participatory, multi-media exploration of different conceptions, theorisations and experiences of the future.
The Art of Cultivating Desires for a Different World
Critical Hedonism(s)
How can we collectively produce visions of the good life that outcompete the obsolete and failing visions from the last century? This seminar-style discussion will centre around a series of prompts and questions designed to surface strategies for cultivating transformative desires and aspirational frameworks.
How to Start a Cooperative
workers.coop, not/nowhere and Calverts
A Q&A session on what a worker co-op is and how you can start one. Members of two creative co-ops — not/nowhere and Calverts — will share their experiences of organising cooperatively, explain what the first steps are to starting one and point you towards further support and resources. Facilitated by Caleb Elliott, member of Principle Six and host of the workers.coop podcast, Punchcard.
Workshops
A Lexicon of Alternative Economies & Activist Strategies
The Alternative School of Economics
Can you define solidarity? What does precarity mean? What is money? Together we will collectively define words used to describe systems & economies of daily life, sharing the knowledge in the room as a support system and collaborative strategy.
Archival Imaginaries
MayDay Rooms
This workshop will explore what it means to activate the archive and how we can learn from past movements to imagine radically different futures. We’ll explore our archive of print ephemera and reflect on how the material and visual culture of past movements can make historical struggles perceptible to us once more.
Collectivising Feminist Publishing #2
Slow + Dirty Press
A workshop to think through how to build systems of resource and skill sharing. Let’s build on our networks of solidarity across presses, members of the self-publishing community, campaigners and activists.
Art for the Streets, Not the Galleries
Autonomous Design Group
How can we get radical ideas into public consciousness? In this workshop we’ll explore the history of radical design, and how ideas can be communicated effectively. Then we’ll make some posters together!
Dreaming Nourishing Futures
Platform food justice collective
A creative writing workshop that asks you to dream about nourishing futures. Meditate on the preciousness of food and land for the sustenance of life and community. How can we write stories about these signifiers of vitality — food and land — as symbols of resistance against scarce systems that want us hungry and far apart? What would the land say if it could speak? Can you articulate the beauty that swirls around a shared meal with people you love?
Smash the Fash! Game Jam
Games Transformed
We’ll work with a games designer to develop creative game ideas in response to the theme of this year’s Games Transformed festival: Smash the Fash!
Reflection Matters
Common Knowledge
After a day of workshops, discussions and collective thinking, this session brings everyone back together to take stock, collectively address the most interesting questions that have emerged, and warm up the bar.
Other activities
Kids Activities with Nanny Solidarity Network: zine-making, instaprint photography and creative play.
Mural Painting with Parents for Palestine
Collective Art-Making with Anna Tokareva: a low pressure space for sensorial play.
Stalls
Open studios with Pelican residents
Common Knowledge
Migrants in Culture
Unit 38
There will be lunch, drinks and music afterwards. Free childcare for children over 5 is available, run by the Nanny Solidarity Network. All profits from ticket sales will be distributed between our speakers.
Organised by Common Knowledge, Unit 38 and Migrants in Culture, with support from the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, Pelican House and The World Transformed.