Selected Projects and workshops
Schule des Postkapitalismus | School of Postcapitalism (common(s)lab, 2019-2020)
The School of Postcapitalism was anchored to the premise that the neoliberal order of late capitalism has permeated manifold spheres of our lives, impeding routes towards different forms of consciousness and action, and stifling our ability to imagine beyond “capitalist realism” (Fisher 2009). We drew on feminist consciousness-raising practices and critical pedagogy to begin unmasking the conditions (re)producing the status quo, to dismantle what is taken as fact in order to invoke different values and imaginaries, finding the moments of refusal and the seeds that can and do germinate post-capitalist ways of thinking, being and doing.
Images: CC BA-SA Common(s)Lab
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Common Sense | Common Space (common(s)lab, 2018)
Drawing on somatic and psychogeographic practices, the immersive workshops held over the duration of a weekend, included a talk by local interdisciplinary design studio, ON/OFF; psychogeographic urban constructions and cartographies; co-designing, prototyping, and making (with found materials and simple hand tools) common constructions to activate common spaces in the neighbourhood.
The workshops explored an immersive ethnography of the senses and bodily capacities in and across urban space to dismantle normative and codified spatial conditions and perform new understandings and practices of the urban. Urban movement explorations provided a field to explore care-full ecologies of bodies and environments, human and non-human matter, which could foster new forms of subjectivity, agency, and soft resistance as well as frame the later design and construction process.
Images: CC BA-SA Common(s)Lab
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Wunschproduktion Process (Common Grounds | Commons Evening School, 2019-2020)
The Wunschproduktion (“wish” or “desire” production) process was organised by the Commons Evening School during the broader 99-Years campaign to secure the future of Prinzessinnengarten. The Wunschproduktion process adopted fictions and performative modes to reveal the forces and desires at play in the city, contest and cultivate them, and carve different imaginaries and practices for the city as collective oeuvre. A workshop titled Speculative Real-Estate | Speculative Fiction invited participants to imagine a future scenario where Prinzessinnengarten and other social spaces had lost their lease to predatory real-estate practices. Through practices of deep listening, historical and speculative timeline construction, formats of individual narrative construction, and collective storytelling, pressing issues were framed and fictional realms were created to explore problems, needs, and dreams.
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Community Economies (common(s)lab @ Floating University, Berlin, 2020)
Introducing theoretical frameworks for diverse, community, and solidarity economies, we explored post-capitalist processes, structures, and economies that could sustain a space such as the Floating University. We mobilised feminist-inspired consciousness-raising and ‘deep mapping’ methodologies to register and visualise the myriad practices, values, meanings, and economies (monetary | non-monetary | visible | invisible) that are already embedded in the project and the broader neighbourhood context.
Image: CC BA-SA Common(s)Lab
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Care Workshop (common(s)lab @ Questioning the Creative City Symposium, New Castle, 2019)
Common(s)Lab was invited to host a performative workshop at the Questioning the Creative City Symposium in New Castle. The workshop sought to subvert the marginalisation of socially reproductive activities and (de)construct meanings related to care.
Image: CC BA-SA Common(s)Lab
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Do-It-Together Building Workshops (common(s)lab, 2018-2019)
The DIT (Do-It-Together) building workshops, organised in collaboration with carpenter and designer Veiko Liis, gravitated, firstly, around the disruption of passive, mono-directional imparting of knowledge and, secondly, around the facilitation of commoning processes by enabling access to shared materials, tools, skills, and knowledge. The workshops began with a psychogeographic walk around the neighbourhood where participants would scavenge for, and salvage, waste wood and other materials. Rather than creating something ex nihilo, the material itself becomes a catalyst in both the design and making process
Image: CC BA-SA Common(s)Lab
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Schenkmarkt: Performative Gifting Market in Public Space (common(s)lab, 2018-2020)
Playing with a common occurrence—gift boxes and swap shops—the Schenkmarkt, or gifting market, took place several times a year. Attempting to move beyond exchange logics—whether mediated by money or bartering equivalence—in both our imaginaries and practice it was based on a principle of indirect (and non-equivalent) reciprocity. Working with a (un)familiar format in public urban space—akin to a flea market yet absent clear exchange rules and money—was (intentionally and productively) disorienting; engendering questions and conversations while subverting both normative ‘shopping’ and urban experiences to foster generosity and playfulness.
Image: CC BA-SA Common(s)Lab
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Urban Commons Workshop @ Reclaim the City (2018)
A workshop on the urban commons in the context of “Reclaim the City”, a German-Ukrainian youth exchange on participative citizenship and urban activism, curated and hosted by Kulturlabor Trial&Error e. V. in Berlin.
Image: CC BY-NC 4.0 KulturLabor Trial&Error e.V.
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Melissa Harrison 