The following workshop has now passed.

Paraeducation, Activism and Art Led by Annie Fletcher, Sunday 8 July 2007, The Exchange

The workshop coincided with the opening weekend of social systems organised by ProjectBase.

Annie Fletcher led this curatorial workshop as an extension of her on-going project Paraeducation with artist Sarah Pierce. The Workshop explored a series of provocative questions: What is a Producer? What is an organisation? What is Self-organisation? How do activist and educational strategies relate to artistic practice today?

Invited participants were asked to respond to a series of questions devised by Pierce and Fletcher around this topic. The Workshop was employed as a way of activating a critical think-tank around issues of production, organisation and community. By bringing together an identified group of chosen specialists to share their experiences with invitees and interested professionals working in Cornwall, it built upon previous research carried out by Fletcher and Pierce.

This workshop began by focusing on the leading question ‘What is a Producer?’ in the context of art-making, commissioning, self-organisation and information exchange. This question was situated within the context of a number of case studies provided by the Workshop leader. For example, Fletcher presented the commissioning methodologies used in her projects alongside examples provided by a small number of invited presenters who spoke as part of the event. Invited guests such as Can Altay, Will Bradley, Jason Coburn, Surasi Kusolwong, Superflex, presented alongside South-West and Cornwall-based curators and artists.

Focusing on ‘the curator as producer’, this was a test-pilot workshop for five further workshops planned in the Locating the Producers series. Each will investigate curatorial methodologies and contemporary art commissioning process over the next three years. Considering the question ‘What is a Producer?’, this workshop asked at what stage of the commissioning process are curators implicated as the producers of commissioned artworks. This workshop actively engaged with a wide variety of issues that stemmed from Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Author as Producer’, with each participant actively engaged with a lexicon of terms selected by Fletcher and Pierce such as action, communication, revolution, tendency, technique, struggle and fascim.

Download workshop outline

'The Author as Producer' by Walter Benjamin