Rehearsing Hospitality: Accessing Abundance during Institutional Breakdown with artist Dawn Weleski

Create is delighted to present Rehearsing Hospitality: Accessing Abundance during Institutional Breakdown, a 3-session online workshop with artist Dawn Weleski on Tuesday 29 November, Thursday 1 December and Tuesday 6 December 2022.

How can artists facilitate projects to expand and contract, support collaborators and participants in both joining and leaving projects, and ensure sustainability without compromising the artistic integrity and autonomy of the project, all while avoiding becoming part of the institution?

The series will address the politics of transitioning into more collective and durational forms of practice, as well as the complex negotiations required both internally, within collaborations and externally, with external stakeholders and resource-holders.

During a 3-session workshop for artists, arts collectives, and community organisers, we will:

• share and discuss para-organisational forms (collectives) for socially engaged and collaborative arts practice;
• examine how and why these collectives have approached and exceeded their justice-oriented goals;
• discuss methods of planning and protecting goals, customisable for each workshop participant’s work
• identify gaps in skill sets and tools and how to fill these gaps
• address potential conflict within and beyond projects while preserving a free creative practice

If projects fail, how do we respond positively and constructively, to inform future work? How can we be fully transparent and accountable in these times of (perceived) failure? How do we personally and collectively recover and move towards co-production as a collective?

Application

To apply, please submit a message of interest as to why you wish to participate (any medium, if written 200 words max, 5 minutes max for audio-visual format), as well as a biography (any medium, if written 200 words max, 5 minutes max for audio-visual format) to vance[at]create-ireland.ie with the subject line “Workshop with Dawn Weleski”.  Audio, video and images are also accepted as applications.  The deadline for applications is Thursday 17 November, 4pm (Irish time).  A workshop fee of €30 will apply. No participant will be disqualified for fiscal precarity.  Those with financial, access or other requirements are invited to contact Create on vance[at]create-ireland.ie, or 01 473 6600, to discuss how we can best support you to attend.  Ideally, participants will be able to participate in all three modules.

Dawn Weleski (they & she) co-founded and co-directed Conflict Kitchen (with Jon Rubin), a take-out restaurant that served cuisine from countries with which the U.S. government is in conflict. Their art practice administers a political stress test, antagonising routine cultural behavior by repurposing underground brawls, revolutionary protests, and political offices as transformative social stages. Previous work includes City Council Wrestling, a series of public wrestling matches where citizens, pro-am wrestlers, and city council members personified their political passions into wrestling characters and co-founded Fair Share Fare (with Jen Rae), a food futures research and climate emergency relief collective.

Weleski has worked in hospitality and food service for over 25 years, and their current wage work as bartender / baker / line cook, house cleaner, landscaper, and Emergency Medical Technician, among other gigs, informs their collective stewardship of emergentCNY, a rural Central New York mutual aid network that exchanges goods and services during times of ever-present crisis through reciprocal care, rest, repair and regeneration. emergentCNY links people across geography, time and systematised difference through its repurposed ambulance that archives and transmits stories of historical and contemporary mutual aid in CNY and around the world.