The Radical Teaching Workshop: Feminist Practices of Writing and Mapping

September 23rd and 24th, 2022

More information here.

With: Wiki Riot Squad (Hannah Schmedes, Eva Königshofen, Lena Wassermeier), topsoil (Sofia Villena Araya, Deniz Kirkali and Amelie Wedel), From Where I Stand (Oona Lochner and Isabel Mehl) and Karolin Meunier.

During the two days we want to explore and test different forms of collective learning. The three workshops will focus on feminist practices of writing as ways of experimental knowledge production. There is a growing desire for many to leave traditional teaching institutions and their outdated formats of knowledge transmission in order to collectively share knowledge in a collective way. What other practices and techniques are available? How can we create new places to practice other ways of teaching and learning? Based on these questions, the three workshops are dedicated to different forms of feminist knowledge production. They not only draw on the long tradition of feminist practices of empowerment and consciousness raising, but also use speculative and artistic formats to realize a different kind of learning.

Concept: Gerko Egert

At Vierte Welt In coperation with nocturne – Plattform for experimental Knowledge Production

Funded by the Hauptstadtkulturfonds.

Address:

Vierte Welt

Kottbusser Tor im Zentrum Kreuzberg | Adalbertstr. 96 | Galerie 1.OG | 10999 Berlin
U-Bhf Kottbusser Tor | Linie U1 | U8 | U12 |  Ausgang Adalbertstraße

Programm:

Friday, Sep. 23rd, 2022

13:00 – 17:00 How to Edit in Not-So-Open Sources: Wikipedia Workshop with @wiki_riot_squad

Saturday, Sep. 24th, 2022

 11:00 – 13:00 Workshop with topsoil (Sofia Villena Araya, Deniz Kirkali and Amelie Wedel)

You can join this event also via Zoom: Join Zoom Meeting (Meeting ID: 874 4205 8743)

14:00 – 16:30 Wissen in Klammern. Ein Schreibworkshop mit From Where I Stand (Oona Lochner and Isabel Mehl)

17:00 – 18:00 Discussion (Host: Karolin Meunier)

Details:

Friday, Sep. 23rd, 2022

13:00 – 17:00

How to Edit in Not-So-Open Sources: Wikipedia Workshop with @wiki_riot_squad 

(Hannah Schmedes, Eva Königshofen, Lena Wassermeier)

 With the foundation of Wikipedia over 20 years ago, all the knowledge in the world was supposed to be collected in a space accessible to everyone. However, „open source“ is not as open as intended. Who feels entitled to process and upload their knowledge as supposedly ‘neutral’ knowledge? The encyclopedists of the present are no longer called Diderot or d’Alembert but “geiserich75” or “hyperrolf”. Yet, up to today the world’s largest encyclopedic internet platform is white and male-dominated.

 Together we will look for loopholes and productive rule violations in Wikipedia and give you insights into structural problems of Wikipedia and, above all, tools to become active editors yourself.

 Please bring a laptop or other device for writing online.

Saturday, Sep. 24th, 2022

11:00 – 13:00

Mapping Encounters, Worksop with topsoil

(Sofia Villena Araya, Deniz Kirkali and Amelie Wedel)

You can join this event also via Zoom: Join Zoom Meeting

(Meeting ID: 874 4205 8743)

“Mapping Encounters” draws from one of the techniques which have proven central to our way of working as a collective: maps. Through maps, we think together and document our collaborative processes; we try to discern the different layers and conceptual densities while visualizing the diverse ways in which our thinking and sensibilities play out. 

For this hybrid workshop, we will offer that technique in order to share and reflect on the expectations, bodily sensations, questions, and thoughts that affect the collective configuration of learning spaces. We will work in small groups and build up layers of mapping the encounter of the workshop itself in dialogue with past (and possible future) learning experiences. 

topsoil is a transnational curatorial and research collective formed by Sofia Villena Araya, Deniz Kirkali and Amelie Wedel in 2017 in London. Based in San Jose, Istanbul and Berlin, together we seek to bring into conversation our various contextual and disciplinary perspectives by threading a notion of learning through friendship. Through prolonged conversation, we ask how to work and think with each other, prioritizing care and sensibility to what drives our research and practice. We initiate long-term collaborative research projects with thinkers and practitioners to collect methods and tools that help us move towards a shared ground while being attentive to specificities. 

The workshop will be in English.

Online participation possible.

14:00 – 16:30

Bracketing Knowledge. A workshop with From Where I Stand

(Oona Lochner and Isabel Mehl)

Which knowledge matters – and why? This feminist question converges philosophical, questions with those of writing and everyday living. With its offensive contextualization of knowledge, feminist writing comes into conflict with a still powerful claim to objectivity in the sciences and the long tradition of backgrounding certain forms of knowledge by bracketing it. Pointing to one’s own entanglement with the object of knowledge (see Haraway et al.) draws attention to the situation of writing in all its social, bodily, and affective dimensions: Am I sitting in an office or at an improvised desk in my bedroom? Is a crying baby knocking on the door? What is my gaze interested in? What noise form do I hear in the background? What experiences and whose knowledge accompany me at my table?

Which knowledge matters is a negotiation that is not only theoretical, but is a battle fought in every text. Literally bracketing something can become a gesture of indeterminacy. It delays any judgment and gives one’s writing time to allow the different moments of knowledge to come into contact with each other, to sit back and wait for a (provisional) outcome.

With writing exercises and experiments, we want to investigate our writing, its conditions and omissions. Together we look at hierarchies of knowledge and rehearse our ability to work with ambivalences, disagreements, and the provisional.

The workshop will be in German and/or English.

Unfortunately, online participation is not possible.

17:00 – 18:00 

Discussion

(Host: Karolin Meunier)