Work Places and their Future Stories – Summer School with Anamarija Batista

Alicja Rogalska & Lukasz Surowiec, Tear Dealer, 2014. © Alicja Rogalska & Lukasz Surowiec

I’m excited to have been selected for Fire Station Artist Studio’s Summer School: Work Places and their Future Stories, which will have significant areas of overlap with my PhD research.

The Summer School will be led by curator and art historian Anamarija Batista (the image featured above is by artists Alicja Rogalska & Lukasz Surowiec, whose work featured in Batista’s 2018 exhibition Productive Work – What is it supposed to be?, frei_raum exhibition space museumsQuartier, Vienna). The school will focus on how we can think about workplaces, and consider how we can relate them to the ideas of exchange and production. The school will discuss these questions in the context of serial working conditions, collaboration, knowledge production and art education. Batista has also invited philosopher and art educator Iris Laner, and artist and academic Sven Anderson to contribute.

In these sessions we will engage with the question of how productivity, collaboration and development are reflected in the actual design of ‘workplace’, but also in its ideas. The conceptions of work processes play an important role here, in connection with issues like how collaborative working is promoted, how individual workplaces should be arranged, who connects with whom, who is able to make decisions and whose voice is heard by others. Therefore, we will take a special interest in revolutionary institutions of art education and in new forms of dynamic workplaces in the field of art, which are organized in the form of artist in residence programs. These examples give us a basis to discuss future notions of productivity as well as collaboration, but also to imagine the way these will be expressed in the form of workplace arrangements.