Onassis AiR: Workshop | Systering Collective

Systering is a collective of cultural workers, writers, dramaturges, choreographers, and curators arriving from diverse contexts, practicing collective thinking and writing. Aiming at practices of comradeship, sistering, and critical collaboration, they share an interest in feminism, institutional critique, labor, and precarity. Recently they have published the collectively written book “Systering” as part of the fourth cycle of the Critical Practice (Made in YU) program.

During their residency, the Systering collective will have the possibility to meet local artists, collectives, organizations, and groups from Athens, and share their work through two workshops: Opening the book together: The "Systering" book - sharing interests, dreams and problems” & “Tell me yours, I'll tell you mine. The precarious story-sharing workshop”.

Tuesday, 19 December

Workshop 1 | 17:00 - 19:30

Opening the book together: The “Systering” book – sharing interests, dreams, and problems

This workshop is an invitation to open our “Systering” book together. It is a tool for practicing collective thinking and writing, searching for modes of creative and critical togetherness, and keeping the “systering” category open and inviting. The book is a reflection on collectiveness and interdependence, decentralization, feminist approaches to curation and institutional critique within the realm of dance and choreography. It was created as a collaborative work in the frame of the fouth cycle of Critical Practice (Made in Yugoslavia), a program developed by the Nomad Dance Academy and part of the apap – Feminist Futures project, that empowers discursive reflections on contemporary performing arts focused on, but not restricted to, the post-Yugoslav region. Through tasks and reflections taken up in a collective manner, we will unpack some of this book’s core angles, in order to include the participants in the “systering” practice and empower and reconsider the tools of critical thinking.

Wednesday, 20 December

Workshop 2 | 17:00 – 20:00

Tell me yours, I’ll tell you mine: The precarious story-sharing workshop

This workshop has been conceived as an ongoing transnational project exploring the uneasy experience of being precarious and ways of talking about it. It aims to collectively unpack and re-think the term of precarity in the academic and professional sector of the performing arts through personal narrations. During the workshop, we will map, read, and analyze the precarious stories that are not, but could have been, ours. By multiplying questions and speculating on alternative storylines, we will prefigure other ways of operating and building relations in the cultural field. Looking beyond the established theorization of the insecure figure of the student, artist, and cultural worker, we will open a safe space to anonymously share and reflect on how to rethink, reframe, and rewrite our embodied precarities.

As a preface to our workshop, we propose a short and pleasant questionnaire where you can share your precarious stories anonymously – they will be safe with us, though we may analyze and deconstruct them during the workshop, trying to trace the systemic faults that made those stories happen:

Answer the questionnaire here