Co-weaving Workshop

Keyword: Collective Story-making, Worlds in Common, Futuring

<Co-Weaving> project was initiated from the realization that our futures are not created by a single person, but by the collective intelligence of many. The global problems of climate change and inequality we face cannot be solved alone; they require collective action and solutions. Therefore, the Co-Weaving workshop focuses on cultivating the methodological structure of the collective story-making process, in which multiple participants influence each other’s stories, manifest different desires, and encourage what we have in common, rather than crafting a perfect narrative attributed to a single, genius author of Western modern aesthetics. In other words, this artistic research experiments with collaborative storymaking methods through the choreography of voices of multiplicity, seamlessly interweaving affective sensations, movement, speech, time, and space.

“Co-Future Weaving” workshops will further engage beyond art communities and into social urban/rural communities, facilitating community discussions on sustainability and future concerns amid economic turbulence, redevelopment plans, aging populations, and climate change. This approach aims to enhance communities’ collective knowledge-making process and is inspired by social change and participatory design workshops (Jungk et al. 1987; Joint Research Center 2019; Um 2014). Through this inquiry, Co-Weaving aims to seek every procedure as an opportunity to remake the relationships that the capitalocene unmade as a performative social intervention.

Reference

Jungk, R and Müllert, N. (1987) Future Workshops – How to Create Desirable Futures. London: Institute for. Social Invention.

Joint Research Center, 12 November 2019, Exploratory Workshop -Future Trends and Farmers in 2040, EU Policy Lab, https://policy-lab.ec.europa.eu/news/exploratory-workshop-future-trends-and-farmers-2040-2019-11-12_en

Um Heejeong. (2014). The study of a creative workshop for community building with residents’ participation. Master’s thesis. Seoul City University, Public Environment Design Department.

Tejiendo Futuros. (2023) Weaving Futures Toolkit, https://www.unglobalpulse.org/document/weaving-futures-tejiendo-futuros-toolkit/

1st Version (July 2024) <Future Care Making Project> Workshop Series in Seoul with Artist & Parents Artists Communities

is designing a landscape of reproduction (reproduction, reproductive labor) and care that is different from the present through long-term research, workshops, and performance work.
We would like to invite fellow artists and the audience who are interested in this topic to share andlearn from each other’s experiences and knowledge. We hope that the project will not only be completed with a performance, but that ideas and practices can spread widely through meetings and workshops.

Practice Sharing

In this workshop, we write, talk, and move together using the choreographic methods of the <Co-Weaving> performance – meditation, imitating/synchronizing, extending the branches of words & sentences, and building a collective story.

Collective Reading

In this workshop, we read the Marxist-feminist discussions related to reproduction (reproductive labor) issues and redistribution of care. Inspired by the feminist sci-fi writers, we will try to imagine our desirable future. Reading materials will be used as a tool to stimulate and generate our new ideas.

[Reading list]

• The 4B movement: envisioning a feminist future with/in a non-reproductive future in Korea (정의솔, Lee Ji-eun)
• Abolish the Family (Sophie Lewis) and Care Manifesto (The Care Collective)
• Radical Imagination: Feminist Conceptions of the Future (Margaret Keuren) and examples of feminist writers’ Sci-fi (The Left Hand of Darkness, The Wanderground, Woman on the Edge of Time, Camil Story)
• Degrowth and Nomadic Utopianism (Degrowth Copenhagen)

Performance space design workshop for loose boundaries

What if we could allow children to be present at a performance targeted for adults? What if the performance space becomes a space for socialization where children not only encounter art pieces but also learn about social promises and consideration within our society? In this workshop, we discuss and imagine a loosely open, contingency-allowed performance space and create the necessary proposals/devices/promises for that.

2nd Version (Nov 2024) <Co-Weaving> with various public at an art festival and a museum

Knowledge regarded from the dominant Western horizon is based on separation, deduction, and atomisation. Something that lacks complexity and is void of relations is easy to understand. It’s knowledge as a form of zooming in until there’s only one answer, which, however, tends to forget that all living beings are interdependent on each other and that relations often are more important than the (individual) entities connected.
In order to heal the wounds from anthropogenic trauma and regenerate, it’s crucial to research, probe, and practice other forms of knowledge gathering and production, think through forms of entanglement, resilience, togetherness, cohabitation, and forms of sharing that aren’t possible to corporatize.
This workshop guides the participants through practices that address knowledge formation through different perspectives. Listening, storytelling, collective reading, and writing methods, next to physical practices, invite the group in the process of creating self-organized knowledge and conception in relation to rethinking reproductive labor, care practice, and mothering.

The workshop welcomes individuals with an interest in unlearning conventions and is open to practicing alternative ways of gathering, spending time together, and engaging with different ecologies of mental and relational qualities.

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Concept: Suh Yeongran
Collaborator: Wie Sunghee, Jung Eonjin, Jung Leesu, Lee Suna, Lee Seolae
Co-produced by Ob/scene Festival, Idea Museum (Leeum)

This program is presented with the support of 2024 ARKO International Arts Network.

Co-Weaving (Leeum Museum of Art)

‹Co-Weaving› is a corporeal and poetic landscape of practices contemplating present, individual and collective, realities, fantasies, dreams and utopias of reproductive labor and care. It weaves images emanating from each individual into shared fabrics in order to experiment with and create visions for our desirable futures together. Introducing the practice’s different procedures, participants in the workshop will experience several choreographic methods and games: meditation, imitating, and transforming words and movements to branch out from individual images.

It’s crucial to reimagine reproductive labor considering fundamental changes in regard to labor, technology, intergenerational sharing, gender, class, and many other aspects of living together. How can we create safe spaces that are simultaneously creative, adventurous, and politically active? How do we share worries and anxieties, desire and intimacy, visions, and harbor political change as caregivers and fellow human beings? Reimagining reproductive labor is also a fertile ground to practice alternative forms of ecology; mental, relational, and environmental, beyond extractivist industrialism and the destruction of the earth.

We welcome participation interested in care redistribution, future speculation, and speaking and moving, regardless of experience.

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Concept: Suh Yeongran
Collaborator: Wie Sunghee, Jung Eonjin, Jung Leesu, Lee Suna, Lee Seolae
Co-produced by Ob/scene Festival, Idea Museum (Leeum)

This program is presented with the support of 2024 ARKO International Arts Network.

3rd Version Becoming Ivy + Co-Weaving (Islandsbrygge Kulturhuset, CPH) (May 2025)

Have you ever been greeted by evergreen Ivy on the streets? They are everywhere. Some people may think Ivy is a parasitic plant. However, they are not. Ivy’s vitality is leaning on other species; at the same time, it gives a lot, too. Ivy’s flexibility and adaptability, connecting, following, and imitating abilities, receive help from the other species, and give back to the different species. Indeed, Ivy teaches us the interdependence of care, leaning/receiving, and giving.

We reflect Ivy’s feature, interdependence, within us. We reach, follow, imitate, and connect each other’s different images recalled by Ivy and weave them into a shared landscape to create visions for our prosperity by playing with a choreographic score: ‘storytelling meditation’, ‘imitating and transforming words and movements’, ‘Ivy group dance’, and ‘group echoing’.

Thanks to the participants who shared their Ivy images, stories, and dance. Weaving each other’s connections with Ivy brought out even more intimate and abundant knowledge about Ivy, creating plural understandings of the entanglement in ecosystems.

After this workshop, I am dreaming of sharing the Co-weaving workshop as a tool to listen and support each other’s needs, desires to weave our collective imageries about care, communities, and the pluriversality of our future.