With Radical Care, In Motion
Invited by CIFAS to be a mentor at the Producer’s Academy 2025.
I developed the following conceptual idea to offer a workshop:
In an era where boundaries between audience and artist are increasingly porous, and where public spaces are reclaimed as stages for expression, protest, and community gathering, the role of the cultural producer demands both reinvention and deep reflection. This workshop invites participants into a shared inquiry: how do we, as producers and cultural workers, accompany the journey of artistic creation into the public realm? How do we navigate the complexities, responsibilities, and possibilities of participatory work when it unfolds outside the black box and into the streets, plazas, markets, and neighbourhoods?
During this encounter, we will explore, share, and critically confront experiences and questions arising from participatory arts practices. These are not merely questions of logistics or project management, although those are certainly part of the terrain, but of ethics, imagination, and care. What is the role of the producer when translating a work into a public space? How active and creative is that role, and in which ways does it become a co-authorship? Which ethical frameworks guide our choices, and how do we respond when those frameworks come into tension with institutional expectations or unpredictable real-life scenarios?
We will examine the plurality of the producer’s role through real case studies, individual experiences, and collective analysis. From projects initiated in the Global South, where resourcefulness and resistance often shape the very conditions of artistic work, to contexts in the Global North, where questions of authorship, institutionalisation, and civic engagement might take other forms, this workshop proposes a space to learn across differences.
The workshop will include moments of group reflection, provocations, and working sessions where participants will be encouraged to bring their own questions, doubts, and learnings into the room.
Ultimately, our time together is about recognising the craft of cultural production as an embodied, relational, and deeply political practice. It is about giving space to our questions and daring to ask them aloud in community. From south to north, across disciplines and contexts, we will learn from each other’s experiences - both the joyful and the difficult - and collectively trace the outlines of a practice that is at once intimate and public, planned and emergent, rigorous and wild.