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Workshop Week, Skill Share Sessions
(and other creative clichés that adopt alliteration)
Abandon Artistic Autonomy by Uniting U’re Uniqueness, aka a contentious call towards ‘common’ creativity.
Piet Zwart Institute, November 2011
  So You're at Art School; A painting workshop Chi and Chores; martial arts meets ergonomics Occupying a Winters Eve; How to sew your pants Cooking Up Something Spanish; Paella in real time via youtube  

Participant call out:

Everyone has a skill someone else should seek. As active artists we’ve probably done really random things for and with work. A lot of the time, the procuring processes, getting good at those things is really repetitive, bitterly boring, or an initial investment you don’t get much benefit back from. When do you use it again? It just sits there in your brain like a little lump of private property not helping anyone or anything. Make the most of it! Help someone else cut the crap of lesson learning by monotonous mistakes. Donate your knowledge! The intention of this call is to run a week of short self-organized workshops in which anyone can participate, in the non-pressurized presence of PZI peers. We sit in surplus so measure is menial come to what you want dodge what you don’t. Supporting a ‘time blank’ rather than time/bank system, swapping and sharing skills need not be on the slate. Basically if you think you’ve found one of life’s shortcuts somewhere, then simply share your skill.
Maybe there’s a material you’ve mastered. Maybe you’ve done reading research on someone specific and can facilitate facts. Maybe you listened to a lecture that was lacking lustre but can condense it. Maybe you’ve finessed finding funds. Maybe you had a project or profession that involved; data moshing, vinyl application, belly dancing, tile laying, tie dying, the list is so long – its impossible to imagine what you’ve could possibly have under that belt! Alternatively maybe you recognise a capacity that we might have as a group that just need us together to unleash or devise.
Your workshop might not. It might fail, that’s fine. We’ll learn a little regardless and maybe someone else can help fix or figure it out. Obviously we wont become experts in such a short space of time but tricks of the trade go along way.

Workshops included;
- A demonstration on how to talk to dogs. (Real dogs and Hot dogs in the court yard at PZI courtesy of a local dog whisperer).
- Old school is new school getting down and dirty (a collective painting workshop)
- Sewing, knitting, making pom-poms, (money saving measures for winter and Christmas)
- A presentations and collective discussion geared towards forming a Lacan cartel .
- Carpentry as a tool not a skill: Cheats, Cleats, Wedges and other Strategies
(A top-ten of basic cheats and short cuts for gallery carpentry.)
- A Move Closer, feel like we are wheelie making… (An introduction to the pottery wheel).
- A selective introduction to the Polish language, done through the terms of love.
-"And I would let you do it", consensual violence and the sensitive self. A collective and selective reading group.
- An introductory Belly Dancing class
- Cooking something Spanish
Paella preparation in real time via youtube (meal cooked for entire course).
- Move and be moved. (A dancing, feeling, sweating and ‘being’ extravaganza).
- Chi and Chores, Martial arts meets ergonomics (Introduction to Tai Chi)
- Thinking big (A method of collective dictation geared towards the quick construction of essay drafts, narrative writing and proposal texts).
- Stealing language (Performed workshop taking place covertly at a local language school)
- and a social show down where we ate and drank the remaining budget.

PAST WORK
.
RESEARCH PROJECTS
PPPProject
Thinking Big
Random Play
Fiddling with the Faculty (w/ Edward Clive)
Janeness
Draft 1, 2, & 3 (w/ Jane Frances Dunlop)
Liberate Labour
Triggering Diagram
The Enormous Space
.


88 Hight Street
Flat 4
Ramsgate
Kent
CT11 9RX

Fiona James