Short Abstract:

We are gathering a series of explorative studios under the conceptual provocation ‘re-designing the social’. Anthropologists, artists, and designers are invited to platform their attempts and prototypes to enact, perform, or stage alternative ways of arranging and composing the world (worldings).

Long Abstract:

As convenors of #Colleex (EASA's Collaboratory for Ethnographic Experimentation), we aim to bring the conference out of the University's walls and gather a series of open-format presentations of different colleagues who are eager to share their anthropological experiments and to reflect in which way their practice has been re-designing the social wherever it took place. Thus, this lab is open for open-format presentations and our role will be mostly a coordinating one.

Our call for experimentation emphasises contributions that demonstrate redesign in the re/making, trying out things that might not be conventional or established in an open-ended gesture, not necessarily militant, nor done with materials traditionally identified as political. Instead, our call is an appeal to sketching out a different kind of interventionist practice: an activity of re-working both social relations as well as their representation as a way of expanding the knowable and the role of anthropology in the contemporary. We encourage contributors to conceive their studios in an open-format that invites visitors, guests, conference attendees to intervene and share in their experimentations. Drawing inspiration from these studios of experimentation, we also invite participants to reflect on how their practices might reconfigure what anthropology could be through a re-design intervention.