Artistic practice as queer civics: a series of online encounters about making better worlds through lived experience, material support, fun, and mutation.
DIY Hope Machines with Dr.Duckie aims to cultivate artistic forms and processes that generate hopeful agency. At this time of deep uncertainty, jeopardy, and possibility, it invites people to consider their practice as a form of intentional civic action and explore how it might serve the emergence of better worlds. The online workshop, spread over six weeks and run in collaboration with Folkestone Fringe, consists of individual and group conversations and low-stakes experimental exercises.
It uses the conceptual framework of ‘homemade mutant hope machines’ developed during Ben’s doctoral research with Duckie, centring ideas around material support, mutation and fun. The format is experimental and likely to mutate. It’s about exploring a process with collective care rather than generating a product – but we hope participants will end up with a small totem or talisman that represents the world they want to help create and their practice as a form of hopeful agency.
This workshop is intended for five participants, who will be supported with a bursary of £200 each to include any expenses. People from any field are welcome to apply, especially those interested in participatory performance practices and/or intentional links between artistic practice and political or community-based action. We are particularly interested to hear from artists with a personal connection to Folkestone, and those interested in how art relates to hope, material support, mutation and fun. We welcome applications from Black, POC, queer and disabled artists. To apply, please send a one-page document or two-minute audio/video message to [email protected] and [email protected] by 10am on Friday July 24 2020, mentioning your name, your field of practice and experience, what interests you about the workshop and what you hope to get out of it.
The workshop will run between Monday July 27 and Friday September 11 2020, with 2 x 1-hour online meetings per week – so a total of 12 hours over 6 weeks. (Exact dates and times to be discussed with participants.) If it is safe and practical, we might also try to meet together in Folkestone around the start and end of the project. (To be discussed with participants.)
Ben Walters – aka Dr Duckie – is not really an artist but knows a lot of them. Time Out London’s former cabaret editor, Ben’s live productions include pedagogical extravaganza The Prime of Ms David Hoyle, variety night Come With Me If You Want to Live, and BURN, a platform for moving images by cabaret artists. He’s also made documentaries about underground performance and wrote the application to make the Royal Vauxhall Tavern the UK’s first queer listed building. Ben’s doctoral research with Duckie framed the queer collective’s community projects as ‘homemade mutant hope machines’ and he tries to share his findings beyond the academy through talks and workshops.
A list of the artist development workshops being run as part of DIY 2020.
Restless Study will be a space for people to study which privileges restlessness and distraction over focus and concentration. We will generate, manipulate and circulate objects of study, including text, conversation, image, action, movement, and beyond. We will throw off the shackles of goal-oriented education to reclaim study as a vital, liberatory mode of being in dialogue with others!
Read moreA six-week collectively-generated course on and in Fat Performance for fat people.
Read moreThis DIY project uses performance informed by science fiction, magic, ritual and idiocy to explore how our relationship to the public realm has changed and will continue to change because of COVID-19.
Read moreSocial life marooned like Tom Hanks in Castaway? Don’t befriend a volleyball, get social at Live Art Social (distance) Club!
Read moreA 3-day remote retreat for six producers, curators and arts administrators who have had to undo their present and future work due to COVID-19. This DIY is run in partnership with ArtHouse Jersey
Read moreInterested in using Live Art to create lo-fi short films exploring mental health and queer culture?
Read more“… Money talks, Dirty cash I want you, dirty cash I need you, oho”
Read moreAutobiographical sessions for postcolonial diaspora. Bodies as places of legacy; voice as ancestral calling; sharing stories; rituals; being vulnerable together.
Read moreConversations on expanded multi-dimensional ideas of anatomy, divination, geography and language, seeking to bring transformational movement to ideas of trauma and healing as they are shaped by oppressive systems and given form in our bodies
Read moreThat’s Governance! invites participants to interrogate conditions of governance, and propose, through roleplay, a non-human candidate for Scottish Sculpture Workshop (SSW)’s Board of Trustees.
Read more“We will each immerse ourselves in a nearby forest and co-generate shared experiences through a series of synchronous somatic exercises and collective reading online. These activities will be the departure point for writing ghost stories and erotica.”
Read moreWhite Vinegar Workshop revolves around the quote from leading New York artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles “After the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?”.
Read moreLeonie and Ishwari will be working to explore alternative processes of mapping time and landscape, moving away from ideas of linearity and colonial legacies of demarcation. Focussing on process rather than production, they will do this using plant-based darkroom printing, fermentation and chorus interventions.
Read moreMake like teenagers and build the Discord fanfiction version of Live Art from your bedroom, under the mentorship of real-life Discord experts (teenagers).
Read moreAn intimate online pleasure LAB for disabled queers exploring Kink as an artistic tool for self-care.
Read moreA workshop aimed at fans and future fans of the late great Katherine Araniello, a queer, crip, red-headed firebrand whose work lives on to disturb and tantalize in equal measure.
Read moreA workshop for artists who lost projects in 2020, sharing what we have lost, learned and gained, creating mourning rituals and (re)discovering our individual and collective resources.
Read moreAn online residency queerying ‘The politics of Intimacy’ within our bodies and lives as well as in our creative practice/s
Read moreA Way Away uses the mode of correspondence course to explore ideas around distance – spatial and temporal, physical and social, imagined and real.
Read moreTaking an experimental journey of gentle sensory under-load, progressively leading up to observing or participating in a full body wrap.
Read moreApply to participate in DIY 2020; workshops developed and lead BY artists, FOR artists
Read moreThe first in a series of workshop sessions for SWANA young people to find out more about creative careers, and exchange knowledge with not only each other, but boss industry professionals smashing it in their fields.
Read moreProfessional development projects – BY artists FOR artists – across the UK.
Read moreA curious, performative invitation towards embodied practices of the Islamic faith
Read moreBecome the privileged human you’ve always wanted to be
Read more